Health, Nutrition and Wellbeing
As a responsible business, we want to support our customers, Partners and those in the communities where we operate to live happy and healthy lives. Our health plan focuses on three areas of impact: healthy and sustainable diets, healthy lifestyles and healthy happy communities.
As trusted experts on nutrition and health and wellbeing, we aim to inspire people to make the optimum choices for their lives, providing easy access to healthier products alongside helpful services, information and guidance.
We believe that food should be delicious and enjoyed. Mealtimes and the food people eat form part of their everyday experiences, including creating opportunities to make social connections. But the overall balance of a diet is also vital for influencing a range of physical and mental health outcomes.
Commitments
- Increase the proportion of Good Health labelled food and drink sales to 65% by 2026;
- Achieve the government’s reformulation targets for salt and calories;
- Increase the fibre content across key product categories by 25% by 2030;
- Expand the volume sales of fruit, vegetables and plant protein by 10% by 2030.
Highlights
Mission Statement: To help customers, Partners, suppliers and the communities in which we operate lead healthier, happier lives.
Eat More Fibre
We’re boosting fibre content by adding more wholegrains, legumes, veg, nuts and seeds to recipes.
We’re on a mission to increase fibre content across key categories by 25% by 2030. As part of that mission, which aligns with the National Food Strategy, we became the first retailer to join the Beans is How coalition, promoting beans as a sustainable, healthy and inexpensive source of protein.
Inclusive Play
90%
of Home-Start volunteers felt some parents struggle to play with their children.
For National Play Day, we launched a new Inclusive Play course in collaboration with Home-Start UK. The course includes expert guidance and practical advice developed alongside the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge, with further input from the LEGO Group.
Plant Power
We helped customers understand the benefits of a more diverse plant intake.
To help our customers eat more plants and increase their fibre intake we ran a 30 Plants campaign alonside new product innovation and the introduction of a Plant Varieties logo. We also developed a partnership with ZOE, the personalised nutrition and science company, launching their wholefood supplement Daily 30+. We encouraged customers to include more plants into their daily routines through recipes.
Food Nutrition
5 modules
covering the fundamentals of healthy eating.
In 2024, we made food nutrition e-learning available to all Partners. The content, developed in partnership with the British Nutrition Foundation, explores the fundamentals of a healthy, balanced diet and empowers Partners to interpret food labels, make sustainable diet choices and hold productive conversations with customers about health and nutrition.
Encouraging healthy eating
In January 2025, building on our partnership with Zoe, Waitrose launched a new healthy eating campaign focused on helping customers incorporate at least 30 plants per week into their diets. Amongst other activities, the campaign will see our supermarket adding plant logos indicating the content of products and recipes. Eating more plants as a proportion of a regular diet, including those not always considered fruit and veg, such as seeds, beans, herbs and spices, has proven benefits for health as well as the environment.
Progress
Exploring connections between climate, health and food
We’ve become a founding member of Forum for the Future’s Climate and Health Coalition Food Cluster, which has been established to enable private sector action and collaboration on the related challenges of climate, health and food. The Cluster’s ambition is to “accelerate the transformation of food and agricultural systems towards outcomes that deliver positive health and climate outcomes for both people and planet.”
Ultra-processed foods
We know this topic is of real concern to our customers – 69% of those we asked said they’re trying to cut ultra-processed foods out of their diets. We already take a strong line against artificial colours and flavours as well as hydrogenated fats, but in response to this growing demand, we’ve added 150 additives to our list of banned food ingredients. We’re also working to ensure we look for alternatives to additives wherever possible.
Challenges
Because we understand its importance to our customers and society as a whole, we want to maintain the momentum we’ve generated towards encouraging healthier diets. This year, we’ve noticed that the external focus on healthy eating hasn’t been as intense. Despite this, we believe that our business and others should continue to collaborate on prioritising this crucial agenda.
We also believe more work can be done to bring together activity that benefits both health and the environment. We’re seeking to collaborate more on this connection between what’s good for nutrition and good for the planet, including through our membership of Forum for the Future’s Climate and Health Coalition Food Cluster and work across our supply chains.
Looking Forward
Over the year ahead, we’ll continue to focus on making it easier for customers and Partners to make informed choices about their health. This includes ensuring we maintain efforts to drive down fat, sugar and salt contents in our products and push up consumption of fibre and plants, as exemplified by our January 2025 healthy eating campaign.
Case Study
Let’s eat more plants!
Good health starts with people eating more of the delicious food they love rather than worrying too much about the foods they need to restrict. That’s why Waitrose is introducing a new plant varieties logo on products and recipes, making it easier for customers to choose good food, more often.
Fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices – eating the widest possible range of wholefoods is not just nutritious, it’s delicious, too.
To make it even easier to consume more of these valuable foods, we launched a new ‘plant variety’ logo across Waitrose stores in January 2025. Designed to promote consuming a greater diversity and balance of plants, the logo shines a light on wholefood ingredients, making these beneficial ingredients stand out on packaging and shelves. It does this by clearly calling out the number of plants in products and recipes, helping customers eat more of these tasty and nutritionally valuable plants.
In support of our customers, we’ve resolved to make an even bigger effort to increase the volume of fruit, vegetables and plant protein we sell, setting a target to boost sales of these products by 10%. And we’re backing this up with a commitment to increase the fibre in key product categories by 25% by 2030, too.
“Eating more plants is a win-win for both people and planet, and something we all need to be doing more of given that just 9% of UK adults eat enough fibre. So it's brilliant to see Waitrose committing to support their customers and colleagues to eat more plant rich diets and showing real leadership on this critically important issue.” Rebecca Tobi, Senior Business & Investor Engagement Manager, The Food Foundation
