The Case for Accelerating Corporate Performance & Accountability for Healthy & Sustainable Diets

Why Stronger Performance on Healthy, and Sustainable Diets Matters for Forward Looking Companies

Food companies are entering a new era of scrutiny: investors, regulators, and consumers increasingly expect transparency not only on sustainable food production, but also on how portfolios contribute to healthier and sustainable diets. Companies that embrace reporting as a catalyst for change can strengthen performance, build trust, and demonstrate leadership in shaping resilient, sustainable food systems.

In the past decades, ESG reporting of food companies has primarily focused on reporting on environmental topics, highlighting the importance of food production as a lever to mitigate climate change. While this remains foundational, stakeholder expectations of food companies today are vastly evolving to assess company contributions across the value chain in a more holistic way. Nutrition-related themes—such as nutrition governance, responsible marketing, portfolio healthiness and protein diversification strategies—have entered corporate benchmarking frameworks in past 10 years alongside climate and social topics and are starting to emerge in sector-specific reporting standards and frameworks. Yet public disclosure on dietary outcomes is not even across the food sector. According to the 2023 World Benchmarking Alliance Food & Agriculture Benchmark, fewer than 20% of companies provide adequate transparency on key nutrition-related topics. This gap represents an opportunity for stakeholders to align and make reporting on healthy and sustainable diets a catalyst for change.

Several drivers are underpinning the need for stronger and more interconnected disclosure towards healthy and sustainable diets:

• Regulation is expanding: Today, jurisdictions representing nearly 55% of global GDP, are developing or implementing local or regional disclosure standards for mandatory reporting that are aligned with ISSB reporting standards, that are inclusive of nutrition disclosure requirements.
• Transparency on pack: Over recent years, the number of countries adopting mandatory nutrition labelling policies has increased globally. Today, 95 countries require nutrient declarations on packaged foods. Front-of-pack labeling (FOPL) is in place in 44 countries, of which mandatory in 16.
• Investors increasingly view nutrition as material: Investors and investor-related frameworks are recognizing nutrition as a material risk and opportunity area, with emerging analyses linking the healthiness of the product portfolio to improved financial performance.
• ESG frameworks are evolving: The evolvement of sector-specific reporting standards such as the ISSB, which adopted SASB’s sector standards as a global baseline, is formalizing investor expectations on nutrition-related disclosure.
• A lever for reaching corporate climate goals-if done right: A shift toward healthy, sustainable diets is considered a critical lever for reducing land use, deforestation, while driving public health improvements. Yet, according to investor network FAIRR, 75% of companies currently overlook protein diversification as a tool to decarbonize. Furthermore, only 25% of companies have board-level expertise on nutrition, which may limit their ability to capture risks and opportunities effectively.

With science around what constitutes a healthy, sustainable diet becoming more crystallized, the expectations, disclosure practices, and frameworks on healthy and sustainable diets are becoming more numerous. At the same time, they remain fragmented: a WBCSD business briefing across ESG reporting, standards, and benchmarks identified over 145 nutrition-related indicators scattered across different frameworks and thematic domains, highlighting the opportunity for convergence. Indicators cluster around a few thematic areas; marketing strategies and practices, healthiness of product portfolios, protein diversification, governance, product distribution and equity, workforce nutrition, and food loss and waste. The study showed that while some thematic areas were incorporated across multiple frameworks, others are still siloed.

Some food companies already demonstrate what progress on increasing transparency around healthy and sustainable diets looks like:

• In 2022, Unilever became the first company to disclose its portfolio using six externally endorsed Nutrient Profile Models (NPMs), as well as its own internal models.
• Nestlé has committed to strengthening its nutrition reporting on global and country level, enabling clearer decision making for regional policy makers.
• Retailer Tesco calls upon the UK government to make reporting on healthy food sales mandatory.
• Retailer Lidl calls for mandatory plant-based targets to ‘level the playing field’.

Shifting our food system to deliver healthy and sustainable diets is a critical lever for businesses to address spiraling supply volatility, rising input costs and increasing scrutiny from investors, regulators and consumers, while achieving global climate, nature, equity and food and nutrition security goals. Reliable information grounded in credible frameworks, indicators and metrics delivers value for business by enabling companies to:

• Streamline corporate reporting: Improve consistency and comparability in monitoring and reporting.
• Scale financing: Establish a shared measurement architecture that supports aligned incentives and unlocks investment across the value chain.
• Strengthen value chain collaboration: Enable coordinated demand signals and collective action through alignment on shared outcomes.
• Improve strategic decision-making: Provide a coherent set of outcomes that can be embedded into corporate strategies and performance management.
• Shape effective policy design: Support the integration of widely used corporate indicators into national, regional, and international policy frameworks, increasing coherence and reducing reporting burdens.

WBCSD supports food companies in strengthening performance and accountability in disclosure on healthy and sustainable diets, using it as a catalyst for change. Our work helps members:

• Navigate emerging standards and identify material risks and opportunities.
• Drive convergence on indicators and metrics across the sector on material topics.
• Provide implementation guidance across functions and markets to embed healthy and sustainable diet indicators alongside climate and equity.
• Build enabling environments that support resilient, sustainable, and healthy food systems.

With nutrition being increasingly acknowledged as a material topic, reporting on corporate performance on healthy and sustainable diets is here to stay. Companies that invest now will be better positioned to lead change, strengthen trust, and unlock value for the people, planet, and business.

For more information on WBCSD’s work on healthy and sustainable diet metrics, reach out to Laura van Geel ( vangeel@wbcsd.org ) or Ludmila Cmarkova ( cmarkova@wbcsd.org