Commitment

Reduce calories, salt and sugar

Private sector - food business / United Kingdom

Unilever

Commitment made: 27 Oct 2021
Related event: 2021 Tokyo N4G Summit
Targeted location (aggregate)

Global - This commitment is global and applies to all Unilever (including JV with PepsiCo) products in all countries

Verification status Verified Find out more

Commitment 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

Global Nutrition Targets

Adult obesity
Salt/sodium intake

Nutrition Action Classification across all goals

Enabling

  • Financial
  • Operational
  • Leadership and governance
  • Research monitoring and data

Policy

  • Food environment
  • Food supply chain
  • Consumer knowledge
  • Nutrition care services

Impact

  • Undernutrition
  • Diet
  • Obesity and diet-related NCDs
  • Food and nutrition security

N4G themes covered by goals

  • Food
  • Health
  • Resilience
  • Data
  • Financing

Total funding and costs across all goals

Funders Unilever
Funding mechanism private sector
Cost secured 100% costs have been secured. The programme is an integral part of our ongoing renovation and innovation programme and not an individual project. Therefore, it is impossible to define the exact investment.
Total costs estimated Not been estimated / unknown

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