We understand that tackling health from a retailer’s perspective takes a combination of making our products healthier and making healthier choices easier for our customers. Some of our biggest achievements in this area include:
- Increasing accessibility and visibility of fruit and veg by introducing Pick of the Week in 2015, which discounts 6 different fruits and veg every week.
- Relocating all fresh fruit and veg to the front of stores in 2018.
- Supporting parents with the burden of pest power by introducing a ban on cartoon characters on own brand breakfast cereals in 2020.
- Introducing a ‘healthy checkouts’ policy in 2014 ahead of government legislations, aimed at reducing impulse purchases of sweets and sugary treats.
- Trialling a 4 week ‘Healthier Swaps’ initiative in 2021 across all GB stores where we signposted a range of healthier alternative products that are easy to make and at the same price or less. We presented customers with simple ways to make swaps, often not requiring them to alter meal plans. We’re committed to continue rolling out customer campaigns like Healthier Swaps to drive the sale of healthier products.
All the interventions and initiatives we run support our overarching commitments to:
- Increase sales, based on tonnage, of healthy and healthier products to at least 80% by 2025*
- Increase sales of fresh fruit and veg by 35% by 2026
*This commitment was revised in 2023 using FSA’s widely recognised 2004/05 Nutrient Profile Model (NPM). Excludes alcoholic drinks.
Find out how we’re defining and reporting healthy and healthier food sales, as well as making our food healthier below.
Defining ‘healthy’ food
We apply FSA’s 2004/05 Nutrient Profile Model (NPM) to our entire own brand range, excluding single-ingredient products. This NPM reviews energy, saturated fat, total sugar, sodium, fibre, protein and fruit, nut and vegetable content of products, producing an overall score. Foods scoring less than 4 points and drinks scoring less than 1 point, as well as all single-ingredient products (e.g. fruit, veg, meat, poultry), are classified as healthy.
We recognise that not all products can be healthy, but we’re keen to provide healthier alternatives where possible. To do this, we’ve defined healthier as foods scoring four to six points and drinks scoring one to three points. Foods and drinks scoring more than this are classified as least healthy.
This information is disseminated across key departments in the business and used as a key metric in which our improvements in nutritional values are monitored and opportunities for improvement identified.
Reporting sales of ‘healthy’ food
We’re committed to annually reporting the proportion of our entire own brand range which are healthy, healthier, or least healthy, using this methodology to inform our stakeholders of our ongoing performance. As part of this commitment, we’ve pledged to monitor and track sales of healthy and healthier products, against our total sales. We’re tracking our sales based on volume tonnage as this most accurately represents total levels of nutrition. We compare progress against a 2019 baseline.
Since 2019, we have seen a 3% shift in ‘least healthy’ to ‘healthy’/‘healthier’ products, meaning we’re halfway towards meeting our commitment.
