FRANCE – Swiss food and beverage giant, Nestlé has teamed up with French retailer, Carrefour in the launch of “Adopt a Fruit, Adopt a Vegetable” initiative that aims at improving child nutrition.
The companies said that the initiative will help parents get their children to adopt a healthier and more sustainable diet, promoting daily consumption of fruits and vegetables.
Launching in Carrefour’s stores, the initiative offers parents and their children free fruits and vegetables, alongside recipes providing inspiration and cooking guidance.
The initiative also promotes healthier products that contain whole grain, less sugar and salt, as well as organic and plant-based products.
The initiative has already kicked off across all Carrefour hypermarkets in France. Nestlé and Carrefour have also unveiled plans of implementing the initiative in Argentina and Italy, as well as in other key markets for the two companies.
This initiative falls under the banner of the broader Nestlé for Healthier Kids and Carrefour Act for Food initiatives, each launched worldwide in 2018.
Alexandre Bompard, CEO of Carrefour, says that the as part of the Act for Food program, the retailer is working on the quality of its products by continuously improving them.
“In 2019, we reviewed the recipes of 1,500 Carrefour-branded products and made a strong commitment to baby food, with the switch to 100% Organic in the Carrefour Baby range, eliminating artificial flavours and additives, controversial substances, reducing sugar and salt content and favouring local ingredients.
“By pooling our commitments with those of Nestlé Group, this partnership allows us to go even further to enable parents to offer their children a healthy and varied diet from their earliest age.”
Nestlé CEO Mark Schneider said: “Our commitment to the healthy development of children goes back to the founding of Nestlé. In May 2018, we took our commitment to the next level with the global launch of Nestlé for Healthier Kids.
“We believe we have an important role to play in helping parents promote healthier habits. In 2019 alone, we launched more than 1300 food and beverage products designed to meet children’s specific nutritional needs.
“The partnership with Carrefour will allow us to build greater awareness on the importance of eating varied and healthy meals – ones that include, among other things, more fruits and vegetables. It also offers helpful tools to support parents.”
Carrefour and Nestlé have also committed to increasing the transparency and traceability of their products.
The two companies recently announced the use of blockchain technology to provide consumers with traceability data on their Mousline purée and Guigoz baby milk products.
In addition, the two companies are early adopters of the front-of-the-pack Nutri-Score labelling scheme that provides parents with easy-to-understand nutritional information at a glance.
The implementation of Nutri-Score has started in January 2020.
