Improving nutrition

We need food to feed the world’s population – it’s as simple as that. But food also does so much more. It gives pleasure and brings people together. It enables people to connect through a shared passion. It’s an important part of every culture, yet differs from country to country, region by region. For many people, life without delicious and healthy food just wouldn’t be the same.

However, the way the world produces and consumes food today is unsustainable. By the middle of this century, we will need to feed around 10 billion people with limited environmental resources. Malnutrition is already unacceptably high and progress in tackling this is too slow. At the same time, more than 1 billion people are obese. Clearly, something needs to change.

As the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) acknowledge, responsibility for change is widespread. We need governments, civil society, farmers and chefs to work together to make a change. And food businesses have a critical role to play in making sustainable and nutritious foods and drinks the norm.

Our well-known global brands, such as Knorr, Hellmann’s, Wall’s and Lipton, have a long heritage of producing quality and nutritious foods and refreshments.

Acquisitions like GlaxoSmithKline’s Health Food Drinks portfolio (which is expected to complete in the first half of 2020 and includes its iconic Horlicks brand in India and other Asian markets), The Vegetarian Butcher and Graze, further strengthen our health and well-being offerings. Our local brands, such as Bango and Robertsons, plus new brands like Pukka Herbs, Sir Kensington’s and Mãe Terra, also support our mission to provide delicious, healthy and sustainable products.

However, our mission goes beyond this – we want our brands to take a stance and act on the things that really matter. For instance, in 2019, Ben & Jerry’s continued its long tradition of climate activism, joining the youth-led climate strike in September. Lipton Tea launched its global You.Me.Tea.Now! campaign to combat loneliness by encouraging more quality connections in people’s daily lives. And Hellmann’s, with its Real Taste, Less Waste programme, has been running educational campaigns to rescue leftover food from being thrown away.

We’re working with governments, NGOs and businesses to align with the SDGs to eliminate hunger and promote health and well-being around the world. The business case for action is clear. Studies have shown that for every $1 spent on nutrition, at least $16 is returned in economic benefits. And as well as benefiting the economy, people and the environment, activities like these also help to raise the profile of our brands among consumers.

We aim to produce tasty, accessible, affordable and nutritious products, and encourage people to make nutritious choices through clear labelling and balanced portions. But our responsibility goes further than looking only at nutrition: we strive to source our ingredients sustainably and support farmers and others who make their livelihood from working with us. And we’re reducing our environmental footprint, in particular by offering more plant-based options, eliminating food waste as much as possible and reducing the impact of our plastic packaging.

For more than a decade, we’ve been working to improve the nutritional quality of our products as part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. We’re ensuring our products are Responsibly Delicious by making progress towards meeting our Highest Nutritional Standards and maximising the goodness of our products. We do this by increasing our plant-based offerings, reducing nutrients of concern, such as salt and sugar, as well as lowering calories. We’ve eliminated trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, and we’re providing essential micronutrients in a growing number of our products.

We’re also working to promote Nutritious Diets, using the reach and power of our brands to empower people to make responsible food and refreshment choices, and adopt healthier habits. We ensure our products are available in appropriate portion sizes, clearly labelled with nutritional information and marketed responsibly, so people can make informed choices. We continue to offer a variety of options, at premium to affordable prices, even in the most remote locations across the world. And to achieve our mission, we’re working in partnership with others.

Everything we do is underpinned by evidence-backed scientific research. We contribute to the latest scientific thinking on nutrition, and we maintain high standards of objectivity and integrity. We share our findings through peer-reviewed publications (PDF | 368KB) and presentations at scientific conferences, such as the 4th Congress Hidden Hunger. And we collaborate with prominent research partners like Wageningen University & Research, the Top Consortium for Knowledge and Innovation (TKI) Agri & Food.

In 2019, we opened Hive, our state-of-the-art global Foods Innovation Centre in the Netherlands. This €85 million investment is located on the campus of Wageningen University & Research (known as the ‘Silicon Valley of Foods’). The building is also close to start-ups, scale-ups and other external partners. As an agri-food research hub, its design encourages interaction and shows the outside world our whole foods innovation process in a transparent way. From there, we’re working on the next generation of science and innovations, focusing on more plant-based ingredients and meat alternatives, nutritious foods and sustainable food packaging.

As well as reducing nutrients of concern and increasing micronutrients in the diet, one of the biggest challenges in the future will be to encourage people to make the dietary shift towards a more planet-friendly diet. For our food system to be sustainable, we need many more people to opt for plant-based foods.

Focusing on more plant-based options, products with lower salt, sugar and fat, and foods containing essential micronutrients, requires action from individual food companies. It is the industry’s responsibility to make sure that nutritious foods and refreshments taste great so that people will choose them, rather than less healthy alternatives. We must also focus on increasing transparency in our labelling to help shift consumer preferences.

However, truly transforming our food system to encourage people to eat better will require increased collaboration between governments, NGOs, scientists, retailers and suppliers, as well as the food industry. The key challenge will be facilitating this multi-stakeholder approach towards collective action.