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This is what we’ve already improved in our own brands
16
May
2018
We want to help Colruyt Group customers to make conscious choices about healthy nutrition. We do 3 things in this regards: less sugar, salt and saturated fats, just as delicious according to the taste tests and with enriched ingredients. We’ve been working on this for a while now. But what has actually been achieved?
Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats
Where we can, we reduce or remove the fats in our house brands. Saturated fats are replaced by an alternative with a better composition of fatty acids or better types of fat rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids. So our tagliatelle carbonara now has 10% less saturated fats and our baking bread has 18% less saturated fat.
Breakfast cereals: less sugar and salt, more fibre.
Result: 44% less sugar for Boni Choco Clams and 12% less for Boni Cereal Flakes with pure chocolate. As a result, the sugar content is significantly lower than comparable products from other brands (which you can see immediately when you compare the ingredients on the packaging). But the improvement isn’t about the sugar content alone. The salt content of Everyday Cornflakes has seen a drop of 38%. And Boni muesli now contains 49% more fibre than before.
Reducing? Not so simple!
Other food products have also achieved equally interesting results. Even if they haven’t been easy to accomplish. Because salt, sugar and fats are not just additives.
- They can also be structural ingredients - such as the sugar which gives speculoos its hardness. In that instance, it's technically impossible to lower the sugar content below a certain threshold.
- It can also be a preservative, such as in charcuterie or jams. A reduction therefore means a shorter shelf life.
- Sometimes there are also legal restrictions, such as for mayonnaise whose recipe is prescribed by law.
- The manufacturer must also have the necessary technical facilities to be able to participate in this project.
In addition to these limitations, there is, of course, also the customer: the new formulae must appeal to their taste.
Nutritional value: a constant focus
The work goes on. Starting with the product categories which still need to be screened by the nutritionists. And later for those categories which have already been screened, but for which improvements were not, or were only partially, implemented at that time. For various reasons: technical feasibility, economies of scale, the lack of a supplier. That’s not to say that these improvements won’t be implemented in 1 or 2 years. Our approach is continuous: from now on, every food product will be subject to a progressive improvement process.
It is a thorough effort through which we will systematically address all our products. We’ve already done a lot, but there are still many products waiting in our ambitious project.
With this initiative, we contribute to the following Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.
