Healthy & Sustainable Diets

Our commitment

Our purpose at Lidl GB is to make good food accessible to everyone. It’s important to our customers to eat well, affordably. So we’ve proudly made this a pillar of our sustainability strategy.

Food that’s good for people and good for the planet can be great value too. As a discount retailer, we can play a vital role in empowering our customers to make positive, affordable changes to their diets. We’re taking concrete steps to support our shoppers – including discounting our fruit and veg weekly, incorporating more plant-based ingredients into our range, and reformulating our products to make them even more nutritious.

As part of this journey, we are testing, trialling, and implementing different initiatives to ensure the greatest impact. Learn more below:

Our Healthy and Sustainable Diets policy

Supporting sustainable diets

Growing, producing, and consuming food all has a major impact on the world’s climate, the state of nature, and biodiversity. According to the EAT Lancet Commission, if everyone were to follow a predominantly plant-based diet, around 10 billion people could be fed with healthy foods in 2050 without overburdening the planet. In 2019, the Commission published its Planetary Health Diet (PHD), providing scientific guidance on the recommended daily dietary intakes of different food groups.

In 2016, the UK government published the Eatwell Guide, previously the Eatwell Plate, which provides a similar representation of recommended intakes. Whilst this guide outlines the UK government’s advice on eating a healthy, balanced diet, we have chosen to align ourselves with the PHD which allows for a healthy lifestyle for both individuals and the planet. Our vision is to align with the PHD by 2050 to support net zero climate goals and reduce rates of obesity and other health complications.

Our approach

Our approach to supporting healthy and sustainable diets:

In addition, we use five key mechanisms to help break down the barriers that shoppers may face when buying or preparing foods as well as tackle the assumption that healthy food must cost more.

Promotion and placement
Switching and signposting
Inspiration
Reformulation and range
Collaboration and partnership

We believe these mechanisms can be used by the retail sector to bring about lasting change. They are also tools to optimise the accessibility, visibility, availability, and credibility of all healthier and more sustainable food choices.

Working with our partner WWF

What we eat and how it is produced has a major impact on both climate and nature. Through our choices, we can drive meaningful change. That’s why, working with WWF, we have built on our Healthy and Sustainable Diets strategy as part of our joint mission to provide customers with more sustainable choices.

As part of this strategy, we’ve set ambitious targets across all 31 Lidl countries, using the WWF’s Planet-Based Diets methodology to assess and guide our progress.

Our key goals

Making our range healthier

We aim for at least 80% of our sales to come from healthy or healthier products by 2025, based on tonnage.

We’re also taking steps to increase consumption of plant-based foods to support a shift towards meeting the PHD by 2050. We are committed to increasing the proportion of plant-based foods by 20% by 2030 (capturing fruits, vegetables, wholegrains and plant-based protein sources).

Fibre strategy

We are proudly the first retailer to announce a fibre strategy spanning our entire product offering, with two key targets: we plan to increase the tonnage of total fibre we sell by 20% by 2026 and boost the volume of wholegrains we sell to 25% of total grains by 2030.

To meet our goals, we’re collaborating with our suppliers to enhance our product recipes by incorporating more plant-based, fibre-rich ingredients like lentils, beans, and grains, whilst reducing fats and sugars. We’ll also look to introduce new and exciting high-fibre products - boosting nutritional value and making everyday items healthier.

We’re also the first retailer to sign up to the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) Action on Fibre initiative to help make higher-fibre diets more appealing. We’ll offer monthly Lidl Plus promotions on these products too!

Promoting fruit and veg

To help us increase fresh fruit and vegetable sales by 2026 by 35%, we’re working closely with our suppliers to enhance quality and freshness, prioritising British produce and local sourcing where possible whilst offering weekly discounts on six fruit and veg lines through Pick of the Week.

Plant-based proteins

Through measures outlined above as well as by expanding our Vemondo Plant! range and boosting its presence in-store, we are looking to ensure that sales (tonnage) of plant-based proteins such as legumes, nuts, seeds and vegan alternatives account for 25% of our total protein sales by 2030.

Explore our range of healthy recipes

Explore our Healthy Eating Hub for tips and inspiration

We also work closely with several universities to understand the effectiveness of different healthy eating initiatives. We use this awareness to help support and evidence best practice approaches for influencing positive behaviour change.

The basis of reporting for our commitment to healthy diets can be found below.

Healthy commitment basis of reporting