The product portfolios of the world’s 20 largest food and drink companies are dominated by confectionery, savory snacks, biscuits, cakes and soft drinks, and 89% of overall sales came from unhealthy foods high in sugar , fat and salt. For every $10 spent on these companies’ products in 2020, only $1.10 was spent on healthier products. Companies reliant on soft drinks and confectionery have seen very few – or in the case of Red Bull and Ferrero, none – of their sales come from brands classified as healthier. Healthier categories, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, bread and other staples, accounted for a small proportion of overall sales.
It is increasingly important to protect the core objectives and reputations of public health and other organizations from association with food companies whose revenues come from products that directly contribute to the poor health of populations around the world. . The methods presented in this article provide an objective and transparent way to evaluate companies’ product portfolios and sales. We propose that this document can be used by other organizations in two main ways. The first is that the method could be adapted for use in other countries, with different sales data, composition databases and nutrient profile models specific to the organization’s needs and national context. To facilitate this process, we have presented a detailed step-by-step guide to the method (Fig. 1). The second is that organizations could directly use the overall findings presented here in this paper – they could be used to inform their engagement policies and identify conflicts of interest. These methods could also be used to inform advocacy groups and policymakers about the extent to which corporations contribute to poor diets, and better hold them accountable. The financial community could also use these methods to assess investment risk and the vulnerability of agribusiness companies to stricter health policies – including tax measures – in the future.
It should be noted, however, that the method described here only covered one element of a company’s business practices: the health of its product portfolio and sales. Other elements that may be important to other organizations and agencies include the marketing practices, lobbying practices and influence on health and food policy at the international, national and regional levels of each individual company. Existing resources such as those from ATNI Global Index And Featured National Reports (12) provide an overview of these practices. Organizations in the global health and nutrition community could also consider setting a threshold for the proportion of unhealthy sales that food and beverage companies must meet in order to interact with them. For example, this could be an organization stating that the minority of a company’s sales must come from unhealthy foods (e.g. 49%, 25% or <10%) or, if this is repeated over time, could be based on improvement (e.g. reduction in unhealthy foods). sales by 50% over a given period). Setting and validating these thresholds deserves further research and could encourage companies to improve the health of their sales.
Strengths and weaknesses
A theoretical typology of public-private engagement in the nutrition sector has been published (26) and UNICEF has issued guidance on working with the food and beverage industry (27), this is the first time that an objective and quantitative tool intended to inform engagement decisions has been published. This study has a broad geographic scope and includes data from seven food and beverage markets in each region of the world. Including other countries in the future would provide a better understanding of how sales of major multinational companies vary geographically. Repeating this study every year would allow companies to track their progress over time. Although it is the largest multinational companies that are most likely to seek public-private partnerships and join multi-stakeholder platforms, this study is limited to including only 20 companies. Nationally, a different set of local manufacturers may approach organizations with corporate engagement offers that are not covered here. We were unable to identify any examples of companies whose majority of their sales come from healthier products that could be considered lower risk to organizations. Previous work on nutritional profiling has demonstrated that companies with dairy-dominated portfolios often have overall “healthier” product offerings (28) and it may be that in countries where dairy companies dominate (such as in Europe), there are cases of good practice to be identified. However, other factors may influence the principles of engagement with dairy companies, including their compliance with the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes.
Euromonitor sales data covers brands sold in the packaged food and soft drink categories in 80 countries around the world. The main limitation is that brand-level sales data (e.g. Yoplait yogurts) had to be combined with nutritional information for individual products (e.g. Yoplait original and Yoplait light). This meant that when a brand offers multiple product flavors/variants, the sales of each individual product were weighted equally, whereas it may be that one product variant/flavor accounts for more sales. Ideally, sales data at the product level, rather than the brand level, could be used, although there are limited data sources for product level sales, and those that do exist have their own limitations , including their high cost, publication limits and high imputation levels. (29, 30). This problem could be overcome if companies were more transparent with their data, although they are unlikely to want to report sales of individual products for fear of disclosing information to competitors. Reporting percentages rather than absolute values ($) could help overcome this problem.
316 brands were excluded from this analysis because they could not be associated with nutritional composition data. This represents 20.0% of the total number of brands, but only 12.1% of total sales, suggesting that these were smaller brands with lower sales. There are geographic variations, with 97% of sales data matching nutritional composition data in Brazil, compared to just 62% in China. There are three reasons for these differences: errors in sales data, where brands that are no longer sold in that market are still listed; brands are not captured in the FoodSwitch database; or differences in the translation of product names between sales and composition databases. In the future, missing data could be reduced by using product-level sales data that includes barcodes, so that products between databases can be better compared, even if data sources from More granular sales are often prohibitively expensive (29, 30).
Several NMPs could have been used in this study. WHO has a different model for each of its regions (31,32,33), and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) also has an MNP (33). There are also other widely used models, including the UK Ofcom model (34), the Nutri-Score widely used in Europe (35) and the Health Star Rating system of Australia and New Zealand (36). The WHO Euro NPM was used because it is endorsed by a United Nations agency, is regularly used by researchers, and uses a single model allowing for a unified and comparable method across all country of the world. However, depending on the geographic areas included, a country-specific program may be preferable. It is important to note that some other models, such as the PAHO NPM, are more stringent than the WHO European NPM (37), while others, such as the UK NPM, which do not have thresholds for NSS and therefore classify zero-calorie soft drinks as healthier, are less so.
Comparison with other studies
There are other initiatives that score and rank food companies based on their nutrition and health performance and come to broadly similar conclusions, namely that the world’s largest food companies are focused on sale of less healthy products. The Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI) (28) aims to rank global food and beverage companies based on their contribution to the fight against malnutrition, including overweight and obesity, undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, based on a range of areas, including including governance and management commitments and practices, the safety of their products based on Health Star Ratings and how they influence consumer behavior through labeling and marketing practices. ATNI’s most recent global product profile examined the healthiness of the world’s 25 largest companies across 25 countries and found that a total of 31% of products would be considered “healthier” using the Australasian Health system Star Rating, using the locally appropriate WHO NPM. that only 9% of products would be considered healthier. These results appear consistent with the findings presented here and highlight that using a different MPN is unlikely to change the primary observation that the majority of sales at the world’s largest food and beverage companies come from products unhealthy.
INFORMAS (International Network on Research, Monitoring and Action on Diet and Obesity/NCD) (38) produced a series of business dashboards that assess the impact of businesses on the food system using the Business Impact Assessment on obesity and nutrition (BIA-Obesity) tool, with a focus on policies, commitments, information and nutritional performance declared by companies. (39). Although these measures are based on business practices and companies’ commitment to nutrition-related policies, they are not directly comparable to the quantitative analysis presented in this study.
