Unhealthy Food & Drink

Phil: So Sally, let's talk about this CPG report that just came out. It is from the access to Nutrition initiative, and what they found is a 70% of all foods and beverages are less healthy and not one big CPG company, and they rated 11 of them, gets a majority of its sales from healthier products. Should we be concerned? 

Sally: Yes, Phil. I think this is really important for us to all pay attention to. Those 11 companies that they named are Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg, Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Kraft, Heinz, Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, and Unilever. Now, Unilever did receive the highest score of all of them, but that high score was only five and a half out of 10. So the problem we're seeing is that some of these companies are making goals to provide healthier products,but we're not actually seeing it happen. 

Phil: Yeah. And the average score was just 4.2. And what's interesting, if I look at how they're rating these companies, it's 12 and a half percent is based on nutritional governments and management. Another 35% on the product portfolio healthfulness score, then 17 point a 5% access and affordability of healthy foods, 20% responsible marketing, 5% workforce nutrition, 5% labeling. And you know what has me concerned is even though a lot of these companies, I think it's eight out of the 11, have now done front of pack labeling and they're putting nutritional information on their websites. The bottom line is, I still can go to a website and the information is wrong. So what we really need to do is we really need these companies to step up. Hopefully this report is just giving them a little nudge that says it's time to get healthier.