At Heinz, we take our role as a leading food manufacturer very seriously, with a commitment to introducing healthier food choices and improving the nutrition of our current products where necessary.
The Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend being physically active and eating a variety of nutritious foods from the five food groups every day to promote good health. They also advise choosing foods and drinks which are low in saturated fat, salt and added sugar. In many countries, the general population is consuming above the recommended levels of salt and sugar, including in Australia. We can help lower how much sugar and salt we are consuming through our dietary choices. However, food manufacturers can also help make a significant impact to public health by reducing the amount of salt and sugar added to packaged foods.
Product Reformulation
In Australia, Heinz has had established nutrition programs and reformulation targets in place for many years. These targets are in place to help us to reduce the amount of sugar, saturated fat and sodium in our food, and to also guide our new product development. We’ve also set ourselves a global nutrition commitment to achieve 85% compliance with our Kraft Heinz nutrition guidelines by 2025. The global Kraft Heinz nutrition guidelines identify nutrition targets for our extensive range of product categories with a focus on limiting sugar, sodium, saturated fat and kilojoules
These global nutrition targets apply to all our food categories, and we also incorporate local voluntary industry reformulation targets from the Australian Healthy Food Partnership (read more here) and the New Zealand Heart Foundation (read more here). We ensure we align with the lowest target for sugar, salt or saturated fat to guide our new product development and reformulation of our foods (where required), to help provide healthier food options for Australians.
We are committed to a long-term plan to reformulate products in our key categories to meet our sugar and sodium reduction targets. We approach reformulation as a continuous journey by gradually reducing the sugar and salt in our foods and beverages, whilst continuing to deliver great tasting products. Recent projects include decreasing the sugar and/or sodium in Golden Circle® cordials, Golden Circle® fruit drinks and Gravox® gravy.
New Product Development
We are also committed to new innovative product development which offers lower sugar and/or sodium products, including Golden Circle® Refreshers Low Sugar Fruit Drinks, Heinz® Infant No Added Sugar Custards, Golden Circle® Fruit Drinks 50% less sugar and Heinz® Baked Beanz No Added Sugar. We also continue to offer a range of choices for our consumers, with reduced sugar and/or salt varieties of our popular products including Heinz® Baked Beanz Salt Reduced and Gravox® Traditional Gravy Salt Reduced.
We are strongly committed to offering more vegetable and legume based products, to provide consumers with more convenient and nutritious foods that include these core foods. Some recent new product ranges include Heinz® frozen One Pan meals, Heinz® canned Chilli Beanz, and F. Whitlock & Sons® canned Killer Beans. Helpful vegetable serve advice can be found on many of our soup and meal product labels, which is aligned with the Australian Dietary Guidelines. Heinz has also launched Heinz® Plant Proteinz soup range. These delicious and convenient vegetarian friendly soups provide 15g of plant protein per serve.
We are also offering more products that cater to different dietary needs by expanding our range of vegetarian and vegan certified products, including new Heinz® Seriously Good Vegan mayonnaise and Kraft® Vegan Mac & Cheese.
Simple Ingredients
We are committed to simplifying and improving transparency of ingredients with a focus on no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. A recent launch includes the premium Bare Bones® ready to use gravies and finishing sauces made with simple ingredients and no artificial colours or flavours. Heinz also have many food ranges such as baby food, canned vegetables and fruit which already have simple ingredient lists.
Health Star Rating
Heinz supports and is voluntarily implementing the Health Star Rating system on our packaged food products, to help consumers quickly compare the nutrition of similar packaged foods and make healthier choices. We are focused on improving the Health Star Rating of our current portfolio and where possible, aim to formulate new products with higher levels of vegetables and legumes and lower sodium and sugar to generate a higher Health Star Rating and improve our product range. We are also dedicated to increasing our overall uptake of the Health Star Rating scheme by adding the Health Star Ratings to new products and when label changes are required on existing products. The uptake and average Health Star Ratings of our products are regularly tracked and reviewed by our internal nutrition team, and across ANZ we are tracking towards the 50% uptake industry target in 2024 and the 70% uptake target by 2025. We acknowledge that the Health Star Rating system is used as a metric for various local and global benchmarking initiatives and proudly report that our soup and ready meal products across ANZ score an average Health Star Rating of 3.5 stars, with our beans, legumes, canned fruit, canned vegetables, and frozen vegetables scoring an average Health Star Rating of 4 stars. Read more about how the Health Star Rating system works here.
