Best for food and health

As part of our long heritage of providing great food at fair prices, we aim to be 'Best for food and health'.

We recognise that, as a leading food retailer, we have a key role to play in promoting healthy eating and active lifestyles. Our mission is to make the healthiest choice the easiest choice for our customers, as we believe this is the key to encouraging people to eat healthily and helping them change their behaviour and shopping patterns.

We want to make healthier eating easy for all our customers and colleagues, not only by supplying great tasting, healthy food at affordable prices, but also by helping them make educated, balanced choices. We continue to provide customers with simple, honest and visible nutrition information both on the front of pack traffic-light labelling and back of pack percentage Guideline Daily Amount (or GDA). This year we have improved our labelling to include new healthy option logos. We are constantly looking at reformulating our products to make them healthier, and regularly consult our Nutrition Science Advisory Group of independent specialists, for guidance on nutrition and health issues.

"We welcome the approach of using an independent panel of experts for advice and guidance on nutrition and health. This shows a commitment to taking responsibilities on health seriously, by approaching such issues with scientific rigour."

Members of Sainsbury's Nutrition Science Advisory Group

In March 2011 the Coalition Government launched its Public Health Responsibility Deal involving the Department of Health, industry and the third sector. We were pleased to have been part of the discussions about the Responsibility Deal from the outset and to have signed up to pledges that build on the work we have done over a number of years, for example to make food products healthier and to address irresponsible alcohol consumption.

We also encourage our customers to lead healthier lifestyles, balancing the food they eat with the exercise they take. Our Active Kids scheme is in its seventh year, and through initiatives such as 'Feed your family for £50' and the 'Try Team' we are inspiring more customers to cook from scratch, whatever their ability or budget.

Being healthy is about more than just food, and as part of our comprehensive health strategy, we have continued to improve and develop our health services for customers. This year, we ran cholesterol tests in our in-store pharmacies and gave our pharmacists nutrition training so they can help customers with healthy eating advice and guidance. We also launched Sainsbury's Diets, our industry-leading online dieting service, which helps the 5,500 active members manage their weight responsibly through a realistic and sustainable approach to dieting.

Commitments and progress