The owner of KitKat, Cheerios and Nescafé has announced that it will evolve its nutrition reporting, which will include a sales weighted average measure both for relevant categories and its total portfolio.
The dairy, breakfast cereal and confectionary behemoth’s existing reporting will also be complemented with new data aligned with the scope of the ATNi (Access to Nutrition initiative). Nestlé said it would continue to use the government-approved health star rating system as the basis of its nutrition profile reporting.
“We hope other companies in the food industry will consider following our lead,” wrote CEO Laurent Freixe on social media.
ShareAction, the responsible investment NGO that Freixe met with late last year, said Nestlé had not been following the health star rating system: “It erroneously included certain coffee products, distorting and inflating its score in its reporting for investors and made it incomparable with peers.”
The company will continue to report separately on its specialised nutrition, pet care, and pure coffee product ranges, but it will also provide a breakdown of the healthiness of its remaining sales, in line with ATNi guidelines.
In a statement sent to Just Food, Nestlé disclosed that products with a health star rating of 3.5 and above made up 38% of its net sales in 2024 without pet care and non-food products, compared to 30% with them.
In April 2024, a coalition of Nestlé shareholders, coordinated by ShareAction, filed a resolution that challenged the corporate to dramatically improve its impact on people’s health. The resolution was co-filed by five institutional investors with $1.68tn (£1.35tn) in assets under management, and was supported by 11% of its shareholders.
Garance Boullenger, healthy markets initiative lead at ShareAction, welcomed the change in disclosure policy. “It sends a powerful message that the biggest food company in the world is setting a high standard for the industry on health and nutrition reporting,” she said, adding that Nestlé must now set an “ambitious target” to sell more healthier food options. The current target is to increase the sales of more nutritious products by SFr20–25bn ($24.22-30.28bn) by 2030.
Boullenger accused others, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelez, of “dragging their feet on taking responsibility for their role in the global health crisis”.
ShareAction, which has historically focused on food retailers and manufacturers, is also going after foodservice companies.
In March, the group launched a new set of investor asks specifically targeted at the eating out of home sector. The NGO is calling for greater ambition from fast food chains, restaurants, cafés and other out of home venues around the nutritional quality of their products. Specifically, it wants businesses to start publishing annual sales-based data on the healthiness of their portfolio using an internationally recognised nutrient profiling model and a measure of portion size. It also wants companies to publicly commit to increasing the overall healthiness of sales using a sales weighted metric and set targets.
Transparency of this kind is sorely lacking at the moment. “When it comes to health and nutrition disclosure, the sector is almost starting from ground zero,” said Georgie Cowell, senior research officer at ShareAction during a recent webinar hosted by the NGO.
