Making our foods & drinks healthier
We want to make it easier for you to choose healthier options when it comes to foods and drinks as part of a nutritionally balanced diet. It's why we created the Eat Smart™ and Drink Smart™ logos. In 2003, when we started looking at the nutritional content of all our foods and drinks, there was no global method to assess nutritional composition of specific food products. However, different international bodies, including the U.S. government, had issued guidelines for healthy diets.
These bodies recommended that most people should reduce their consumption of trans fats, saturated fats, salt and sugar to improve their diet and health.
We at Unilever used these guidelines to develop product-specific criteria for the four key nutrients: saturated fats, trans fats, sodium (salt), and sugar. In the U.S. we also take cholesterol into account.
Scientific publication
We are sharing our methodology and benchmarks with scientists and nutritionists around the world and are getting positive feedback from them. The scientific basis for establishing these criteria will be published in a major international scientific journal in 2007. We feel that the basis for setting our product specific criteria should be share openly with scientists and nutritionist around the world.
The Nutrition Enhancement Program
The criteria form the basis of our Nutrition Enhancement Program. We use this program to assess the nutritional quality of all of our food and drink products worldwide and we're improving their quality where possible.
Making a difference
We've assessed the vast majority of our foods and drinks. Although some automatically met the benchmarks, we have made recipe changes to many others. For instance, all of our vegetable oil soft spreads have been reformulated to contain 0g trans fat per serving. Ragu Old World Style Sauce was reduced 25% in sodium and a 10% sodium reduction was made for most side dish products in the Lipton/Knorr line. Furthermore, a 20-25% reduction in sugar levels in certain ready-to-drink teas has been completed.
Foods & drinks with the Eat Smart™ & Drink Smart™ logos
Over one third of our foods and drinks will feature the Eat Smart™ or Drink Smart™ logo. That fraction will increase as we reformulate existing products and introduce new products which are in line with the criteria.
You'll find these logos on a wide range of foods and drinks in the Unilever portfolio, and not just on those that are reduced in fat, low in salt or which offer extra health benefits. It can be found on everything from pasta sauces, margarines, mayonnaise to tea – to name but a few.
During the course of 2007 the logos will appear on the following foods and drinks: Ragu Pasta Sauces, SlimFast meal replacements, Promise Margarines, Skippy Peanut Butter, Lipton tea products, Hellmann's and Best Foods mayonnaise and Bertolli olive oil. On the back of packs you'll find a short explanation about what the logo means, further nutritional information and references to additional information.
Who decides which products qualify for Eat Smart™ & Drink Smart™ logos?
The qualifying criteria for Eat Smart™ & Drink Smart™ are based on up to twenty different sets of dietary guidelines from authorities around the world, including U.S. Dietary Guidelines. An independent scientific committee advises on the criteria, to ensure that they are in line with latest scientific insights and developments in food technology.
