Making our food healthier
We care about health, which is why we've overhauled our entire food and drink portfolio. We've cut down levels of salt, sugar and trans fats and are improving labelling to help you eat better, feel better and stay healthy.
Nutrition Enhancement Programme
At Unilever, we understand just how important food is to our lives. Food doesn't just sustain us, it can nourish and revitalise us. Good food and drink can improve our health and vitality, be fun and bring families and friends together. We care about food because you do.
Global focus
To help make sure that you get the most nutritional benefits from our foods, Unilever launched the Nutrition Enhancement Programme in 2003. The programme so far has scrutinised each and every product in our food and drink portfolio across the globe for levels of trans fat, saturated fats, sodium and sugars.
Raising the bar
Our entire range of more than 30 000 products has now been assessed against stringent nutritional criteria, and as a result of this assessment we have clear strategies for enhancing the nutritional profile of our portfolio.
Each one has been carefully compared to an individual nutritional benchmark, created by Unilever R&D using dietary recommendations from international and national authorities. These benchmarks have been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal (Nijman et al, A method to improve the nutritional quality of foods and beverages based on dietary recommendations. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2007; 61:461-471). As well as improving our existing products, these benchmarks also play an important role in the development of future innovations.
Making a difference
The Nutrition Enhancement Programme is driving real improvements in the nutritional composition of our entire food and beverage portfolio. Between 2005 and 2008, the Nutrition Enhancement Programme resulted in the removal of more than 37 000 tonnes of sugars, 30 000 tonnes of trans fat, 18 000 tonnes of saturated fat and 3 500 tonnes of sodium from across the global portfolio.
Salt reduction strategy
Currently, many countries recommend a daily salt consumption of no more than 6g, whereas the World Health Organization recommends a daily intake of 5g per day. We recently committed to a strategy to further reduce the salt content of our global foods portfolio. We have translated this daily target into specific reductions for our entire portfolio of food products, aiming to reach 6g per day by 2010, with a further reduction to 5g per day by 2015.
In making reductions, we have to balance the optimum nutritional content with consumers' taste preferences. This is a delicate balance to achieve since blind tasting shows that consumers often prefer well-salted products to those with reduced levels of salt.
We keep our portfolio under regular review and will explore opportunities for increasing healthy offerings as new technologies emerge. For example, Hellmann's Extra Light mayonnaise with only 3% fat was made possible thanks to a new technology using natural citrus fibre which reduces calorie content while maintaining a creamy texture.
Proud history
Unilever has a long history of improving the nutritional quality of our products – Knorr first launched soup tablets with meat extract to provide nutrition for the poor in 1886. More recently, Unilever has been reducing the level of trans fats in our spreads since the 1990s, when we were the first company to take action on the issue.
Changing lives
Our programme is not all about reducing levels of fat, sodium and sugar, though. Nearly one-third of the world's children under five are malnourished, and malnutrition contributes to half of all childhood deaths. To try to help overcome nutrient deficiencies in developing countries, Unilever is also fortifying foods, such as enriching Annapurna salt with iodine in Africa and India.
