Better for you

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Encouraging healthy choices

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We know that UK diets are, on average, too high in energy, salt, sugar and fat, and lacking in vegetables, fruit and fibre1. This is why we support Public Health England’s targets to reduce calories, sugar and salt, at the same time as encouraging increased fruit and vegetable intakes in line with the Eatwell Guide.

We seek to do this through the following initiatives that help support customers to eat better:

Here are some of the things we have done as a business to encourage healthier choices and deliver our aim of providing good food for all of us. 

 - We have been using colour-coded front-of-pack nutrition labelling since 2005*.
 - We have been labelling calories in our cafés since 2011, that’s 10 years ahead of the calorie labelling regulations being introduced.
 - In 2016, we were the first retailer to stop all HFSS multi-buy offers on food and soft drinks and have continued to enforce this ahead of the 2025 HFSS promotion regulation.
 - In 2017, we introduced calorie labelling on alcohol. 
 - In 2021, we revised our healthy marketing policy which outlines our commitments in relation to our marketing activity.
 - This year, we launched our recipe meal planner, inspiring and making it easier for customers to plan their weekly shop, enabling them to select healthier recipes and add the ingredients to their baskets at the click of a button. 

In addition to this, we carry out ‘test and learns’ to help change customer behaviour by using our data and collaborations with key partners.  

Read more about our test and learn case studies and how we have nudged customers towards healthier choices.

References:
The National Food Strategy: The Evidence. 2021. Available at: https://www.nationalfoodstrategy.org/the-report/(based on NFS analysis of NDNS time trend and income analysis for years 1 to 9). [Accessed: June 2023].
*The following are exempt from requiring front-of-pack multiple traffic light nutritional labelling: Chewing gum, Food prepared on site (kcals required per serving, however, MTL information is available upon request/ for café on menu boards), Herbs and spices, Little Ones Weaning foods, Milk, Primary fruit and veg, Seasonal confectionery, Biscuits and savoury snacking, Sweeteners, Tea & Coffee, Unflavoured water, Flour, BWS (Energy (kJ and kcal) per serving. Energy per 100ml to be stated.)

Affordability

At least 75 per cent of the food products we price matched to Aldi in our campaigns are Healthy or Better for you choices.  

In our September 2023 price match campaign we increase the diversity and balance of our offer relative to the Eatwell Guide. We included products such as wholewheat pasta, brown rice and tinned salmon.

We safeguard funds to support our vulnerable communities. In 2023 we supported over 19,000 customers over 6 months to take home an additional 770,000 portions of fruit and vegetables with a £2 per week top-up to the Healthy Start vouchers that the government provides to pregnant women with a low-income and families with children under the age of four. 
Furthermore, to help increase the uptake of the NHS Healthy Start scheme itself, we worked with The Bread and Butter Thing, a community-led network of food clubs across the North of England in areas where deprivation can be especially high.

This year with The Bread and Butter Thing we distributed free herbs and seasonings via our ‘Seasoning Shuttle’ to food club members. 

At Christmas we continued to offer customers bags of seasonal vegetables at 19p, resulting in 6,384 tonnes sold, 10.8 per cent more year-on-year.  

To support customers with their New Year health ambitions, we also ran a 3 for 2 promotion on 156 frozen fruit and vegetable lines which we have continued over the summer. 

We know that helping customers to eat better means inspiring them with healthier innovations whilst making quiet improvements to everyday essentials. We have embedded nutritional benchmarking into our product development gate processes, making it an integral part of our ways of working. 

In 2023, we introduced our Flourish brand, for time-poor customers who want to eat tasty, healthy food and continue to support flexitarian or plant-based diets through our Plant Pioneers range. Additionally, we have a number of plant-based sandwiches in our Meal Deal to ensure no price difference for customers seeking to make these choices.

Furthermore, we’ve been working to address our customers barriers to healthy eating. Whilst cost is often cited as the biggest barrier, through our Nectar data we know that time and effort and inspiration also play a role. 

 

Product Reformulation 

To support our customers in making healthy choices, we have continually reformulated our own-brand products to be compliant with government targets for nutrients and food groups. We continue to improve the nutrition profile of our products while making sure we never compromise on quality or taste for our customers. 
Here are some of the improvements that we have achieved between 2015-2024:

To give you some specific examples of where we have done this, in the last year we have reformulated:

Our ready-to-roll puff and shortcrust pastry, removing 130 tonnes of fat


 

3 salad cream lines, removing 25 tonnes of fat. 

Our range of creamy dips, removing 3 tonnes of salt from customers' baskets and complaint with 2024 salt target.

More information on product reformulation and our performance please click here

* These categories were chosen as the focus as they contribute 80% of the volume of our own-brand sugar from the PHE sugar reduction categories. 

Innovation

We're always looking to innovate and pride ourselves on keeping ahead of dietary and lifestyle food trends and requirements to identify new product areas that need to be developed for customers whose dietary needs aren't yet being met. We have a long track record of innovating, from being the first retailers to launch an organic range in 1986 to launching our health sub-brand, Flourish in 2023.

        

        

All salmon is high in omega 3 using biofortification methods through their feed.

Signposting healthier options

Sainsbury’s pioneered the colour-coded nutrition labelling on the front of packs back in 2005 to make signposting to healthy choices easier for our customers. Since then, we have continued to make our product labels and in-store communications as clear and helpful as possible.

 

The say do gap 

We surveyed c.3,000 Nectar customers* across nationally representative demographics that are Sainsbury’s primary shoppers (who do most of their shopping at Sainsbury’s or shop with us at least once a month) and compared their attitude towards health to their typical basket purchases1. 

Sample demographics (%) – JS primary shoppers. Sample weighted as close as possible to natural demographic fallout of JS primary shoppers, based on Savanta nat rep tracking surveys.

When we delve into specific food groups, we start to see a notable say-do gap across almost all the food groups. Whilst customers are effective at estimating their fruit & veg purchases, they are much less accurate when it comes to starchy carbohydrates and, more importantly, discretionary foods.

 

Food category purchasing - Claimed change vs. actual change (kg) per category

Base: All respondents ((n2,991 excl. those that have no Nectar data for either time period)
Q8a: Has the amount you buy of each of these types of food changed in the last year? Nectar Data: Total Weight Change for each category
Source: Savanta Health x COL

References: 
Nielsen. EPOS data. 2023 (unpublished).  
*Customers opted into the research and gave permission for their Nectar purchasing data to be shared for the purposes of this research. Fieldwork was conducted between 2nd-13th February and customer data analysis looked at purchasing behaviours by matching Nectar basket data from January 2022 versus January 2023. 

In Autumn, 2023 we ran our fourth Nectar Fruit and Veg challenge, rewarding shoppers with additional Nectar points for purchasing fruit and vegetables. Customers who participated purchased over 113 million fruit and vegetable portions during the challenge (25 million more portions than 2022 year) and we issued 278 million points through the app, worth nearly £1.4 million.  

We continue to test the link between personalisation and price. ‘Your Nectar Prices’ and ‘Sainsbury’s Offers’ provide 17m customers with personalised discounts and Nectar point bonuses every week on products selected for them. We trialled an integration of product health ratings into this optimisation algorithm to ensure that only products with a healthier score would feature, achieving 7% increase in healthy spend. 

We designed coupon packs to help individuals overcome their toughest health barrier using ‘Top Tips’. This subtle personalisation led to a redemption rate significantly above forecast and the highest engagement of all 2023 direct mail campaigns. However, ‘less healthy’ coupons still outperformed ‘healthy’ and ‘better for you’ coupons showing we still have a lot to learn about how to encourage better choices.