Choices’ Commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals

All around the world, people are at least to some extent concerned about their health. They want to choose what’s good and healthy for them and their families, but are usually not able to spend much time in supermarkets comparing nutrition labels, or are not even able to read or understand the nutrition labels.

Choices wants to help them, in collaboration with food companies and other stakeholders, by making the healthy choice the easy choice by indicating healthier food products with a positive front-of-pack logo, by stimulating industry to improve their products and by contributing to national consumer education. Healthier, more nutritious food is necessary to prevent both non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and malnutrition.

In this way, we want to contribute to global health, which is an essential element of a sustainable world. Therefore we find our work fully aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. In particular with goal 2 to end hunger, goal 3 on good health and goal 17 on partnerships.

Goal 2, target 2.2, to end malnutrition

We contribute to this goal by supporting national nutrition policies in improving nutrition quality in a broad sense, taking into account both NCD and malnutrition prevention. Choices perceives these two goals as interrelated and as one challenge. We believe this should be implemented in a country-specific way. A nice example is the Zambian criteria set for healthy food that is developed by SUN Business Network Zambia and Choices. In these criteria are not only saturated fat, sugar and sodium included as factors, but also certain minerals and vitamins such as vitamin A and iron.

Goal 3, target 3.4, to reduce premature deaths caused by NCDs

Non-communicable diseases are the main death causes in most countries around the world, and this problem is still growing. The Choices criteria aim to contribute to the reduction of non-communicable diseases by means of the reduction of saturated fat, sugar and salt.

Goal 17, target 17.17 on public – private partnerships

We believe in partnerships and collaborations between government, science, business and civil society, in which participants are encouraged and facilitated in doing good for society. Many different stakeholders are needed to make an impact and work towards fulfilment of the SDGs. Choices acts as a unique multi-stakeholder platform within the area of food, bringing about international collaborations to mobilise the best from the different parties involved and to enable sharing learnings.