Nutritious diets, healthy habits for everyone

Helping people make better food choices

We want to make it easier for people to live well by eating delicious, better-for-you food. Positive nutrition and fortification explain how we’re continuing to provide nutritious products. On top of this, we’re taking action to encourage people to make better food choices, such as through our evidence-based, behaviour-change programmes and responsible marketing.

We believe we should be promoting wider change, so we’re looking at the bigger picture too and working with others on how to make our diets more sustainable.

Our strategic approach to nutrition

Our goal is to be nothing less than a World-Class Force for Good in Food. Through our ambition, we’re helping people transition towards healthier diets, while at the same time reducing the environmental impact of the food chain.

• Enabling a healthy diet through our products

  Our Positive Nutrition Commitments guide our product development, helping to make healthier choices easier. Find out more in Positive nutrition and fortification, Plant-based foods and Reducing salt, saturated fat, sugar and calories.

• Ensuring our foods are affordable and accessible to all

  By bringing our products within reach of more people worldwide, we help households of all income levels eat nutritious, affordable and varied diets, including more plant-based foods and options.

• Bringing affordable, nutritious cooking to communities

  Over time, we’ve developed effective healthy eating programmes. We help to tackle an identified local dietary need in vulnerable populations, and work in partnership with experts, local governments and NGOs.

  Our brands are recognised and trusted for their quality and food safety. As such, they play an important role in engaging consumers in our programmes

• Providing inspiration for healthy meals via recipes

  We’re empowering people to cook simple, healthy meals with varied ingredients that are suitable for different lifestyles and budgets. Many of our products are cooking aids, such as sauces and seasonings, which inspire people to create affordable meals and avoid food waste with the help of our recipes.

  Our delicious and healthy recipes are available on dedicated websites, our brands’ pages and on products’ back of pack, as well as to our professional customers.

Ensuring our foods are affordable and accessible to all

We want to make sure that everyone has access to affordable, tasty and nutritious food. This means combating the inequalities people face in accessing healthy food. As incomes become more polarised and inequalities deepen, we see this as critical – and urgent – and we’re working with others to address this.

We’re addressing affordability and accessibility across the world to give people a choice in what they eat. We do this through our product offerings, sales channels, education programmes and, of course, pricing.

Food processing helps to extend the shelf life of food, giving people access to safe, affordable, convenient and nutritious food. It also reduces food loss and waste – for example, dry products have a longer shelf life (which also contributes to making them more affordable). Yet there’s still a perception that processed foods are less nutritious. We’re continuously improving the nutrition of our products and Our position on processed foods (PDF 70.96 KB) explains more.

To determine affordability, robust consumer studies are conducted to test if the offering is appropriately priced and provides value for money for the intended target group, and also their intention to purchase.

To help ensure good nutrition is available to all, we provide our products across a full range of recommended sale prices and package sizes, from small sachets to larger family packs. Examples include Horlicks’ and Boost range of fortified beverages, Tea & Coffee, Kissan Peanut Butter, Knorr’s value pack soups. We also sell our foods through value channels, and contribute to food banks, by redistributing surplus stock that would otherwise have gone to waste.

Using innovative ‘last mile’ distribution channels, such as our long-running Shakti model, we can get our products directly into consumers’ hands and, at the same time, offer guidance on how to eat a balanced diet on a tight budget.

The importance of pricing

Strategic recommended price positioning and a variety of pack sizes in our Nutrition Drinks (Horlicks & Boost range) as well as our nutrient dense products such as Peanut Butter allow us to better balance offerings across our portfolio, enabling access to our products for more people. The actual price paid by shoppers and consumers may vary as a result of retailers and distributors independently applying their own price policies.

By innovating across the recommended price range from our premium to our affordable ranges, and for a variety of channels including mainstream and value, we can bring our products within reach of more people, to serve households of all income levels. We’ve rolled out this model across different regions and product categories.

Alongside pricing, value is equally important and through our recipes we inspire people to create affordable meals. Many of our products are what we call ‘mealmakers’, which contribute to making even basic meals delicious, by adding flavour and goodness to a dish.

Reaching remote areas: the last mile challenge

In India, we found that traditional distribution channels simply weren’t reaching people in remote areas. So we developed a network of small-scale retailers to help us improve people’s access to quality, affordable products.

While we do all we can to get our product pricing and distribution right to help people access nutritious food, that’s only half the challenge. People still need the inspiration and skills to cook healthy meals, so we also provide balanced recipes to help them build healthy diets.

Bringing affordable, nutritious cooking to communities

Through our healthy eating programmes, we’re aiming to reach vulnerable people. Food insecurity has different levels. For some, it may mean difficulty in being able to access a variety of affordable ingredients. For others, it may mean being able to afford a more balanced diet but lacking the skills, knowledge and tools to bring out the best in the food they can afford.

We’ve developed a variety of healthy eating programmes, providing nutrition toolkits for parents, caregivers and community cooks in places where help is needed the most.

The fundamentals of our healthy eating programmes

We’ve been improving the nutritional quality of our products for decades - but we believe that educating people about how they can improve their overall diets will have a greater impact on public health.

We know our products, recipes and toolkits can help provide solutions to clearly identified nutritional needs, so we collaborate with partners on the ground - such as government organisations, NGOs, retailers and agencies - to help tackle them. This is enabled through our sustainability teams, who follow a number of fundamental principles to design and run effective healthy eating programmes.

• An identified nutrition need

  Our healthy eating programmes aim to help fix a local dietary concern identified by a government and/or health authority.

• Culturally and locally relevant

  We ensure our programmes are in line with local culture and tastes. We draw on the expertise of local partners to help design and implement our programmes.

• Available and affordable ingredients

  Often our healthy eating programmes target lower-income households. It’s important therefore that key fresh ingredients recommended in our programmes must be locally available, nutritious and affordable.

• Aligned with dietary guidelines

  We also then sure that recipes and food education are aligned with national dietary guidelines. Our local nutrition experts liaise with key government and/or nutrition partners, who give their seal of approval for the proposed menus, enabling them to be adopted by local agencies implementing the programmes.

• Targeted brand promotion

  It is then the job of our trusted brands to promote the programme to the target audience. Our brands play an important role in helping people adhere to the programmes since they are recognised and trusted for their quality and food safety, which are not always a given in some parts of the world. Experience has shown that branded behaviour-change programmes are effective in raising consumers’ awareness of healthy eating and improving their nutrition habits and cooking skills. And to scale up our programmes effectively, we often adopt a “train the trainers” approach.

• Monitoring and evaluation

  Finally, we keep track of the programme’s progress and impact together with partner agencies.

Tackling food insecurity is vital for communities

Food insecurity is on the rise around the world. We’re adopting a variety of approaches to tackle this pernicious issue, supporting everyday work in communities as well as disasters and emergencies.

Inspiration often starts with a recipe

One way to encourage home cooking is through our on-pack and online recipe suggestions. Our Healthy Recipe Framework (PDF 221.54 KB) makes sure these are in line with Unilever’s Nutrition Standards.

Reclaiming kitchens

We’re helping people to ‘reclaim their kitchens’, making healthy meal planning simple, and shopping even easier. As well as our many brand websites that offer recipes, While others help people to add more vegetables to their plates, cook with seasonal, fresh ingredients, and make life easier with handy meal planners. A good example of healthier recipes executed in India is Kissan time table with a list of 200 recipes co-developed with chefs as healthier options for kid’s tiffin.

Harnessing the power of our brands

Everyone can use a little help and inspiration to cook nutritiously and our brand power can play an important role. Studies have shown that health message campaigns should be relevant, exciting, simple, truthful, and original. And to really convey a message effectively, they should actively involve the target audience too. We follow these principles, and use the power of our brands to encourage people to eat more vegetables, try plant-based recipes and diversify their diets.

Helping people to adopt better habits

It’s not only Knorr and Hellmann’s that are helping people to adopt better habits. Lipton Green Tea’s brand purpose is to awaken Indians to integrate wellbeing into their everyday lives. It’s doing just that by showing people the small steps they can take to stay fit and well hydrated. Through our tea business, we’ve long understood how important hydration is for good health and maintaining just the right amount of body fat goes hand in hand with balanced diet and regular exercise.

We’re raising awareness of the importance of staying fit while remaining hydrated. Apart from the zero-calorie benefit of drinking green tea, it’s also known for its fat-metabolising properties. Scientific studies show that this can be attributed to catechins, a type of flavonoid, of which green tea is a rich source.

We’ve been communicating about the goodness of tea through various channels. Our Lipton Green Tea home-to-home campaign is helping people to understand that a healthy Body Mass Index doesn’t necessarily translate into a healthy body fat percentage and that, in the long run, higher body fat is simply unhealthy. Through our teabags, packs and TV ad, we’re reminding people of small actions they can integrate into their daily routine to lower body fat.