How have global businesses pledged to transform nutrition and food systems?

Transnational food and beverage companies and business organizations have resources to influence and reach billions of people around the world to promote safe and healthy high-quality diets within resilient, equitable and sustainable food systems. The Business Constituency Group (BCG) represents six global business groups, namely, the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), the International Food and Beverage Alliance (IFBA), Food Industry Asia (FIA), the Nutrition Japan Public Private Platform (NJPPP), the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Business Network (SBN), and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). The BCG members were encouraged to make voluntary commitments at the 2021 Tokyo Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit to support the Responsible Business Pledge for Better Nutrition.

For this paper, we examined publicly available evidence to assess and summarize BCG member pledges and evaluate 21 BCG participant food and beverage firms and pledges. We compared BCG members’ Tokyo N4G Summit commitments with expert recommendations, examined 21 BCG firm performance scores based on Access to Nutrition Index (ATNI) and World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) scores, and explored accountability processes to assess and report on implementation progress. We ascertained that only three BCG members (IFBA, SBN and WBCSD) had publicly posted their Tokyo N4G Summit commitments, only five of the 21 participating firms had made pledges and breastmilk substitute manufacturers had made no commitments at all. Firms underperformed when it came to overall, product formulation and responsible marketing scores. We concluded that the BCG members and participant firms should step up their pledges, strengthen their commitments and enhance transparency and accountability processes to meet the Responsible Business Pledge for Better Nutrition.