2016 Global Access To Nutrition Index Investors´ Webinar

On Tuesday, January 19, ATNF organised a webinar for investors´ to present the 2016 Global Index results, highlight where progress has been made and where gaps remain since the 2013 Global Index was published.  More than 30 investors´ have joined the webinar.

The speakers of the webinar were:

• Lauren Compere (Managing Director, Boston Common Asset Management; Board member, Access To Nutrition Foundation)
• Inge Kauer (Executive Director, Access To Nutrition Foundation)
• Laurence Loubieres (Associate Director, Sustainalytics)

Lauren Compere has set the scene by presenting the investor perspective on the Access To Nutrition Index as an independent benchmark to assess the F&B companies´ performance on nutrition. She highlighted the fact that the F&B industry increasingly faces risks which include rising obesity around the world especially child obesity, F&B companies are more and more targets of NGO campaigns, rising double burden of undernutrition and obesity and therefore increased health care costs, especially in lower income countries such as Mexico put governments under pressure to implement sugar taxes. In addition recent studies such as Nelson show changing consumer trends and decreasing packaged food sales in developed markets. These trends significantly influence the environment in which these companies operate. Lauren Comprere closed by saying that she hopes that the 2016 Global Index will be a useful tool for companies, investors and other stakeholders and will enable to develop a roadmap to improving nutritional performance at much needed accelerated speed.

Inge Kauer, ATNF’s Executive Director then presented the mission of ATNF and overarching key findings of the Index highlighting that the world’s largest food companies must step up efforts to address the global nutrition crisis and investors can play a key role in this process. In terms of obesity companies should adopt stronger nutritional strategies and policies, using robust systems to measure the nutritional value of all of their products, tracking the proportion of revenues generated by healthier products, strengthening food labeling to help consumers identify healthier options, and marketing more responsibly to children. To address the serious problem of undernutrition in lower-income countries, in spite of the challenges presented by these fragile markets, companies must work with governments and civil society to find innovative ways to provide affordable and accessible nutritious foods for poorer people.

Laurence Laubieres from Sustainalytics, research partner conducting the 2016 Global Index researcher, has then presented detailed key findings and recommendations per category of the 2016 Global Index report.