Nestlé improves nutrition reporting as pressure grows on other food and beverage companies
16 May 2025Nestlé has urged other major food manufacturing businesses to improve their reporting on the nutritional value of their products.
The owner of Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, and Nesquik has just announced changes to its own reporting.
The changes include complementing its existing reporting with “new data” aligned with the scope of the ATNi (the Access to Nutrition initiative) as well as a “sales-weighted average measure both for relevant categories, and for the total portfolio”.
Nestlé will also continue to use the government approved health star rating (HSR) system as the basis of its nutrition profile reporting.
Nestlé has come under pressure from ShareAction, an NGO pushing for ‘responsible investment’, which accused the world’s largest food company of not following HSR. In April 2024, a coalition of Nestlé shareholders from five institutional investors, with $1.68tn (£1.35tn) in assets under management filed a resolution challenging Nestlé to dramatically improve its impact on people’s health.
The company “erroneously” counted coffee as a healthier food in its disclosure, a significant and fast growing (more than 25%) part of its portfolio, ShareAction wrote in a briefing last year.
“According to the HSR methodology, coffee should not be counted as it has no nutritional value. This has contributed to an inflated score for Nestlé that is incomparable with peers such as Unilever and Danone UKI, both of which have disclosed their scores transparently,” the group added in the 2024 health resolution for shareholders.
The changes announced in April 2025 mean Nestlé 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.
Company CEO Laurent Freixe said: “We have one of the industry’s broadest portfolios – a strength that provides value to both consumers and investors. This is why we will continue to include our specialised nutrition, petcare, and pure coffee ranges in our reporting as they represent more than half of our sales. These categories make important nutritional contributions but are not included in the ATNi scope,” he added.
‘Powerful message’ to Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelēz
According to Nestlé’s non-financial statement 2024, products with a health star rating of 3.5 and above made up 38% of Nestlé’s net sales in 2024 without pet care and non-food products, compared to 30% with these categories included. The more stars, the healthier the product.
ATNi said Nestlé’s move “represents a welcome and important step toward greater accountability in the food sector. By introducing a sales-weighted average healthiness score (based on the health star rating system) at both the portfolio and category levels, the company improves transparency and allows for better assessment of its product offerings”.
Garance Boullenger, healthy markets initiative lead at ShareAction, said the KitKat owner had sent a “powerful message” while “other companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelēz are dragging their feet on taking responsibility for their role in the global health crisis.”
Nestlé boss Freixe said he “hopes other companies in the food industry will consider following our lead”.
The pressure is unlikely to let up on any of the major food companies. ShareAction continues to push Nestlé to set a target to increase the proportion of its sales that come from healthier products.
To align fully with ATNi’s expectations for responsible nutrition reporting, Nestlé would need to set such a target to increase the share of healthier products sold and reduce sales of less healthy products.
There would also need to be greater transparency on reduction of ‘nutrients of concern’, (sugar, sodium and saturated fat), the company would have to show progress on front-of-pack labelling and use of nutrition or health claims, and adhere fully to the WHO code on marketing of breast-milk substitutes.
In November, the fifth edition of the Global Access to Nutrition Index, assessing the world’s 30 largest food and beverage manufacturers and over 52,000 products, showed that more companies are setting targets to improve their portfolio healthiness, using internationally recognised nutrient profiling models (NPMs) to classify products as ‘healthier’.
The estimated sales values of company’s healthier products have also increased, but product portfolio healthiness was found to be lowest in low-income countries. There has also been “little to no improvement in key metrics such as healthiness of product portfolios”, said ATNi.