Description
Consumer understanding is at the heart of our innovation and renovation agenda to be able to deliver food and beverage products that are appealing and tasty to our consumers, and with a better nutritional quality. This goes hand-in-hand with continuous investment in new technologies, together with 3rd parties, that allow us to develop these products, now and in the future.
Unilever's nutritional commitments are embedded in the innovation and reformulation roadmaps of our brands, where specific guardrails are set for our product categories, with clear governance.
The WHO-aligned nutrition standards refer to product levels of salt, saturated fat, trans fats, added or total sugar and kilocalories that are aligned with WHO international dietary guidelines and are therefore the strict Unilever's highest nutritional standards. We evaluate the content of these nutrients in our food and beverage products based on the nutritional specifications. These specifications are the basis for nutrient levels disclosure on our product packaging or websites
All Unilever products worldwide, so all brands in all countires, are in scope for this commitment as well as the products marketed under our joint venture of Lipton with PepsiCo.
Overarching commitment (for commitments submitted pre-2025)
Title
Reduce calories, salt and sugar
Description
We envision a regenerative and equitable food system producing healthy, safe and nutritious food for all. We want to contribute positively to the transformation of the food system through innovation and reformulation by continuously providing food products with higher nutritional value, and lower environmental footprints, as well as reducing nutrients of public health concern.
In this commitment we focus on further reduction of nutrients of public health concern such as salt, sugar, saturated and trans fats, as well as calories.
Unilever's nutrition improvement journey began over 20 years ago when we published our Nutrition Policy, followed by our Nutrition Enhancement Programme in 2003. We reviewed all our products worldwide to assess their salt, sugar and saturated/ trans-fat content and defined actions for improvements. This led to us setting time-bound targets in our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, and by the end of 2020 we had doubled the size of our portfolio of products that meet our Highest Nutritional Standards (HNS). This meant we improved our portfolio from 30% to 61% compliancy to our HNS measured on volume sold in tons.
We received recognition for our achievements and were called out in the 2021 Access to Nutrition index for our nutrient profile and achieved commitments in the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan: "Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), which guided the company and many others in the industry for 10 years. Unilever has a full edged nutrient profiling model Highest Nutritional Standards, which contributes to the company obtaining the highest 'healthy multiplier' possible in ATNI's methodology"
We don't believe there is room for being complacent and we want to take the next step to further drive down the salt, sugar and calorie content of our products resulting in a compliancy to HNS of 70% by end 2022.
This commitment is aligned with the Responsible Business Pledge commitment area, Product (Re)formulation and Innovation for Improved Nutrition
GNR assessment
| Verification status |
Verified
Find out more
|
|---|---|
| SMARTness index |
High
Find out more
|
Details
| Global nutrition target(s) |
Adult obesity
Salt/sodium intake
|
|---|---|
| Nutrition Action Classification(s) |
Policy >
Food supply chain
Find out more
|
| Linked event(s) |
|
| N4G Summit theme(s) |
|
Measurement
| Key indicator | Percent ofannual sales volume (tons sold) of Unilever's food and refreshment products meeting the criteria for highest nutritional standards |
|---|
| Value | Measurement date | |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 61% | 2020 |
| Target | 70% | September 2022 |
Progress
| Value | Measurement date | |
|---|---|---|
| Progress report | 64% | September 2022 |
