Results of the U.S. Spotlight Index 2018 just released

The U.S. Spotlight Index has been designed to provide a valuable tool to stakeholders to track major food and beverage manufacturers’ responses to important nutrition and food industry trends in the United States.

The Index does this by assessing the policies, practices and disclosure of the ten largest food and beverage manufacturers in the Corporate Profile. Additionally, the Index assesses and analyzes how healthy companies’ product portfolios are in the Product Profile.

Key Findings

– The U.S. Spotlight Index finds that the ten largest food and beverage manufacturers lack comprehensive strategies, policies and actions to effectively address the high levels of obesity and diet-related diseases in the United States.

– Despite the United States being their largest single market in the world, these companies disclose less information about their initiatives and activities to support customers health and nutrition in the United States than they do globally

– The companies are not doing enough to market healthier products to consumers whose access to these products is constrained by low income or geographic factors
30% of the products analyzed can be classified as healthy according to independent nutrition criteria, and just 14% of the products met nutrition criteria for marketing to children

Key recommendations

– Companies must make their product portfolios healthier and ensure their healthy products are accessible to all, particularly to those whose access to healthy food is constrained by low income or geographic factors.
Companies are urged to increase their efforts to market healthier products

– Nutrition strategies should encompass comprehensive sets of well-defined U.S. targets for improvement in the following areas: product innovation and reformulation, affordability and accessibility of healthy products, responsible marketing, employee health and wellness, consumer education, nutrition labeling, and lobbying and stakeholder engagement in support of improving diets.

– Companies should be more transparent in their reporting on all key issues and in particular on their progress in meeting their targets in the United States.

Want to find out more?

For a quick overview of the U.S. nutrition context, our key findings and recommendations, take a look at our U.S. Spotlight Index infographic.

The official Press Release for the Index, is available here.

The full report is available for download here.

This short animation provides an insight into the nutrition challenges the United States is currently facing, as well as an overview of the main takeaways from the report.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION by following us on Twitter at @ATNIndex, and using the hashtag #USNutritionIndex. As always we would love to hear your thoughts on this groundbreaking report!