Impressive growth in healthier products of Consumer Goods Forum members
January 28th, 2016
The members of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) have made substantial progress in fulfilling its Health & Wellness resolutions to empower consumers to make healthy choices. Regarding reformulation, members reached an impressive growth in reformulated products of 84,000 healthier product in 2015, compared to 22,500 in 2014. This was demonstrated in the CGF’s yearly survey on the efforts of the members regarding health and wellness.
The Consumer Goods Forum is the association of more than 400 of the largest international food manufacturers and retailers around the globe. The respondents of this year’s survey showed a balanced representation of food and beverage manufactures (44%) and retailers (37%); they were for a great part based in Asian regions (39%).
The survey shows great progress of the members: 95% of the respondents have established policies and activated programmes on at least one of the CGF’s three Health& Wellness Resolutions, whereas 74% of the respondents even undertook action on all three. In 2015 partnerships in health and wellness, for instance between manufactures, retailers and foundations, reached 1.8 billion people. The growth in number of reformulated products almost quadrupled from 22,500 in 2014 to 84,000 in 2015. Choices International, one of the non-business members of the CGF, is happy to see the steps that companies took to make the healthy choice the easy choice. However, much has to be done yet. For example: only 6% of the companies responded that the reformulated products represent at least 60% or more of their food portfolios.
CGF chairs Paul Bulcke (Nestlé CEO) and Dick Boer (Ahold CEO) conclude that “With our collective action on Health & Wellness, more is now being done to help empower consumers to make informed decisions. However, we still have a long way to go. We will need to intensify the effort and we invite more companies to contribute to achieving our collective ambition.”
Read the full press release and report on the CGF website.