Health, Nutrition and Wellbeing

Helping customers, Partners and the communities in which we operate lead healthier, happier lives.

Performance highlights

70%

of Waitrose own-brand food and drink sales meet the Good Health criteria.

Good health

70% of Waitrose own-brand food and drink sales meet the Good Health criteria.

75%

subsidy on nutritious food – and free fruit – in our Partner Dining Rooms.

Supporting Partner nutrition

75% subsidy on nutritious food – and free fruit – in our Partner Dining Rooms.

240+

products carrying the Plant Variety logo.

30 Plants campaign

240+ products carrying the Plant Variety logo.

79

additives removed from Waitrose own-label food and drink products without compromising quality, taste or safety.

Trusting our ingredients

79 additives removed from Waitrose own-label food and drink products without compromising quality, taste or safety.

Our approach to nutrition and health

The demands on people's time and the impact on their lifestyles are increasingly leading to a rise in societal health challenges, such as obesity and mental health issues. A healthy, varied diet is fundamental to a healthy, happy life, but the way we currently consume and produce food has caused diet-related ill health and helped to drive nature and biodiversity loss.

The good news is a diet that is good for people is also good for the planet and spending time in green space or bringing nature into everyday life can benefit mental and physical wellbeing and resilience.

As trusted experts in nutrition and health and wellbeing, we aim to inspire our customers to make optimum choices by providing healthier products, as well as relevant services, information and guidance.

As part of ensuring an improved and balanced offering, we’ll continue to drive positive change by supporting government product reformulation programmes, advocating for consumer health-related initiatives and working collaboratively with research organisations and NGOs.

Meeting Reformulation Targets

Increase volume of fruits, vegetables and plant-based food sales by 10% by 2030

Fibre Goals

Increase fibre content across key categories by 25% by 2030

Expanding Plant-Based Choices

Increase proportion of healthier food and drink sales volume to 85% by 2030

Progress

We’re exploring the vital connections between climate, health and food through collaborative initiatives like the Climate and Health Coalition Food Cluster. In response to customer concerns, we’re strengthening our approach to ultra-processed foods and expanding our list of banned additives. We’re also encouraging healthier eating habits through campaigns that promote plant-rich diets.

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Encouraging healthy eating

In 2025, Waitrose was the first supermarket to introduce a Plant Varieties logo, indicating the content of products and recipes, to help customers integrate more variety into their diet. 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.

The Plant Varieties logo can be found on over 200 Waitrose products with more beans, pulses, legumes, whole grains, fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices.

As part of our ambition to drive healthier baskets, Waitrose is also making good progress towards its targets to increase sales of plants and fibre. This has included lowering the prices of fruits and vegetables and developing more products with the Good Health logo. Over 1,700 foods and drinks now meet the Good Health criteria. Increasing the number of healthy products in popular meal deals – such as Food to Go, which has grown to include over 40 Good Health options – has also supported the drive to boost sales of healthier products.

Exploring connections between climate, health and food

We’re a founding member of Forum for the Future’s Climate and Health Coalition Food Cluster, 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.”

We believe that our business and others should continue to work together on prioritising this crucial agenda. We also believe more work can be done to bring together activities that benefit both health and the environment. We’re continuously seeking to collaborate more on the connection between what’s good for nutrition and good for the planet, including through work with our supply chains.

As such, Waitrose used its convening power to host an event at its Leckford Estate Farm in the autumn. The outcome of this successful event was a shared understanding of the consumer benefits of regenerative farming for health, building an evidence base to tell the story as it evolves over the coming years.

Challenges

We’re committed to keeping healthy eating on the agenda, even as external focus shifts. By collaborating across sectors and supply chains, we’re working to align health and environmental benefits in our food systems. This includes our involvement in initiatives like the Climate and Health Coalition Food Cluster, which supports positive outcomes for both people and planet.

Explore Challenges

Because we understand its importance to our customers and society, we want to maintain the momentum we’ve generated towards encouraging healthier diets. This year, we noticed significant external focus on healthy eating, which has opened up opportunities to discuss innovative ways to meet government and consumer demands.

Responding to consumer trends

The launch of new medicines to manage health and weight resulted in substantial consumer demand for products and recipes with smaller portion sizes that are nutrient-dense. We continue to explore innovative ways to support our customers with their health goals, including the rise in popularity of personalised nutrition.

Future proofing for Government Policy

It has been essential to keep abreast of evolving government plans and legislation to support healthier food environments. This includes a focus on sickness prevention and helping consumers make healthy choices, which will require mandatory reporting and the evolution of the UK Government’s Nutrient Profile Model.

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 help people increase their consumption of fibre and plants, using product innovation and inspiration on healthy lifestyles, whilst being mindful of the saturated fat, sugar and salt content in our products.

Healthy Sales Target

Following product innovation that has helped drive healthier sales, meeting our own-brand healthy sales target ahead of time, Waitrose has established a new target, which extends across the whole basket. Our new target aims to increase sales of all healthy foods and drinks to 85%, as a proportion of total volume sales, by 2030.

Waitrose Bean Pledge

Waitrose has made a commitment to increase the total tonnage of beans, pulses and legumes sold by 25% by 2028. This is part of the Food Foundation's ’Bang in Some Beans’ campaign, which aims to double UK bean consumption by 2028.

Waitrose aims to achieve this commitment by developing and selling more products with beans in and providing more recipe inspiration for customers looking to include more bean dishes into their weekly repertoire.

Let’s eat more plants!

Case Study

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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

Healthy eating week 2025

Case Study

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To help Partners live healthier, happier lives, the Waitrose Own-Brand Health and Nutrition team delivered a Partnership-wide Healthy Eating Week in June. A Partnership first, the week was dedicated to inspiration for healthy eating and nutrition, with all resources created in-house to cover topics chosen by our Wellbeing Champions.

As part of the Partnership wellbeing theme of ‘let’s talk about cancer’, the Waitrose Own-Brand Health and Nutrition team worked with the Wellbeing team to give Partners the inspiration and resources to make positive dietary changes. The activities included a webinar, watched live by more than 60 Partners, on the link between the foods we eat and the risk of developing certain types of cancer.

All posters and leaflets were created and designed in-house. A series of nutrition videos, covering topics such as healthier snacking, eating well on a budget, balanced meals and eating 30 plants a week, received a phenomenal 43,000 views on our Partner Choice platform and social media channels.

Waitrose Nutritionist Alice Goudie ran an ‘ask the Nutritionist’ pop-up at the Bracknell Head Office Partner Dining Room, and Wellbeing Champions delivered local activities across the Partnership using the curated resources. “Our diets can influence everything from our disease risk to immune health, energy levels, sleep, mood and concentration,” said Alice, “So it’s important to eat well to look after our bodies.”

Other activities included competitions on our internal communications channels that received more than 2,300 entries, with Partners winning prizes such as travel cups to support hydration and a high-powered blender for nutritious soups and smoothies.

Partner engagement was excellent throughout, with more than 30 posts from Wellbeing Champions sharing inspiring photos and stories about how they brought the week to life. More than 20 additional community posts on the Partner Dining Room’s page shared vibrant photos of the healthier options on offer.

The positive reception was the result of a huge amount of collaboration, creativity and planning across the Partnership. Thousands of Partners engaged in fun and educational healthy eating activities, helping to deliver an integral part of our health and nutrition framework designed to support people in making the right choices for them.

Governance

In 2021, the John Lewis Partnership Board established a board-level Ethics & Sustainability Committee, recognising the importance of our responsibility to our Partners, the environment and those with whom we build strong relationships, including suppliers, customers and communities. The terms of reference for this Committee state that its purpose is to “assist the Board in fulfilling its responsibilities for setting the Ethics & Sustainability strategy in accordance with our Partnership’s Purpose and Values and ensuring that this strategy is embedded into [our] operations.”

The impact of sustainability and risk to the business is available here and more details on our Partnership Board can be found here.

Product Policies
Our product policies are reviewed on an annual basis. They are in place to ensure we keep up to date with the latest nutrition science and customer preferences.

For example:

Hydrogenated vegetable oils were removed from Waitrose own-brand products in 2006 and are not permitted in any Waitrose foods. We now focus on the reduction of saturated fats from products;
Artificial flavourings and colours were removed from own-brand products in 2009 and are not permitted in any Waitrose foods.

Responsible Marketing
Our marketing policy states:

Food and drink advertising is targeted only at 18-year-olds and over;
Do not use children’s characters on less healthy foods, celebration lines or some seasonal lines;
Use appropriate portion sizes;
Provide nutrition information on all recipes.

Tracking Progress

We will publicly disclose progress on an annual basis on our website and in our annual Ethics and Sustainability report.

Commitment	Scope	Baseline	2023 Progress	2024 Progress	Target
Increase sales of healthy* food and drink, as a proportion of total food sales	Own brand food and drinks (excluding alcohol)	58% (2022)	61%	69%	65% by 2026
Proportion of protein sales that are animal-based**	Branded and own brand food and drinks	88%	88%	83% n.b. more products in scope	n/a
Non High Fat, Sugar or Salt (non-HFSS) sales as a proportion of total sales tonnage	Branded and own brand food and drinks (excluding alcohol)	88% (2023)	88% (2023)	89%	n/a