The central finding is striking: similar products made by different manufacturers can vary enormously in their nutritional and environmental profiles. A ready meal produced by one company might score far worse on both counts than a broadly comparable product sold by a rival. This variation matters because it means that the differences are not dictated by the category itself. If one manufacturer can produce a more nutritious and more sustainable version of a given food, then others in the same category can plausibly do the same. The gap between the best and worst performers within a product type represents, in effect, an untapped reservoir of public health and environmental benefit.

To quantify what could be gained from closing that gap, the authors modelled a scenario in which manufacturers replaced some of their least nutritious and least sustainable products with alternatives scoring closer to the average for their category. The results showed significant potential for improvement across the board. More remarkably, for many manufacturers, more than half of the total achievable improvement could be secured by reformulating or replacing just 10 percent or less of their product line. In other words, a relatively small number of targeted changes could deliver the majority of the benefit, a finding that reframes portfolio reform as a tractable, near-term opportunity rather than a distant aspiration.

The study is, according to its authors, the first of its kind to assess the capacity of food and beverage manufacturers to support both nutrition and environmental sustainability through changes within their existing product portfolios. Lead author Eleanor Hammond, who conducted the research while working at the University of Oxford, explained that the analysis was designed around what companies could realistically do without inventing entirely new product categories. That focus on the existing portfolio is what gives the findings their practical force: the improvements identified do not depend on breakthrough technologies or consumer behaviour change, but on decisions about which products to keep, reformulate, or retire.

The distribution of improvement potential across companies is far from uniform. The researchers found that two well-known British supermarkets, whose own brands collectively account for 28.9 percent of the sales value in the analysis, have some of the largest scope to improve their scores for both environment and nutrition. Broad product ranges spanning many categories give these retailers many opportunities to lift weaker performers toward the standard set by their better products. By contrast, manufacturers with narrow product ranges, such as snack and energy drink producers, generally have less room to improve their scores, since their portfolios offer fewer substitution possibilities and their categories may already sit near the average for the market.

Co-author Dr Michael Clark, Associate Professor in Sustainable Food Solutions at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, framed the findings in terms of the wider transformation that food systems must undergo in the coming decades. If food systems are to transition to more nutritious and environmentally sustainable outcomes, he noted, food manufacturers are going to have to change the products they sell. That change, he argued, can either be driven by the manufacturers themselves or imposed on them by government policy. The study’s results, he said, show that manufacturers can get a head start on this necessary transition by making small changes to their product portfolios today, rather than waiting for regulation to compel action.

The timing of the research is significant. The UK Government is currently under pressure to bring forward legislation requiring mandatory reporting on the nutrition of UK food and beverage products, and the study offers a template for how such reporting could work in practice. According to Dr Clark, the study demonstrates how the UK Government could monitor both sustainability and nutritional outcomes together, rather than treating them as separate policy problems. He added that the approach could also be used for ESG reporting and could support regulatory frameworks such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which requires large companies to disclose detailed information about their environmental and social impacts.

Methodologically, the study is an observational analysis rather than an intervention trial, but its scale gives it considerable weight. Assigning per-100-gram scores for both nutrition and sustainability to the full product ranges of 44 major manufacturers required a systematic assessment of a large share of the UK food retail market, covering approximately 50 percent of sales. Because the scoring was applied consistently across products and companies, the resulting variation cannot be dismissed as an artefact of differing assessment methods. The consistency of the measurement is precisely what allows the authors to compare improvement potential across manufacturers with very different portfolio structures, from diversified retailers to specialist snack producers.

The implications extend beyond the United Kingdom. Food manufacturers everywhere face mounting pressure from investors, regulators, and consumers to demonstrate progress on health and sustainability, yet many have struggled to identify where meaningful change is possible without disrupting their businesses. This study suggests a concrete answer: audit the portfolio, identify the products that fall furthest below category averages on nutrition and sustainability, and prioritise those for reformulation or replacement. Because the analysis shows that a small fraction of products carries a large share of the improvement potential, the approach offers companies a way to achieve substantial, measurable gains with limited commercial disruption. For policymakers, the same data infrastructure could underpin monitoring schemes that hold manufacturers accountable over time.

What makes the findings resonate is their simplicity. The debate over food system transformation is often dominated by visions of radical change, from novel proteins to wholesale dietary shifts, all of which face long timelines and uncertain adoption. This research points to something more immediate: the products that companies already make, and the gaps between them. If a ready meal from one manufacturer can be substantially more nutritious and sustainable than a similar product from another, then the knowledge and capability to produce better food already exists within the industry. The task, as the Oxford team frames it, is to close those gaps deliberately and quickly, whether through voluntary corporate action or through the reporting requirements now being considered by governments. With more than half the potential improvement available from changing just a tenth of a product line, the study makes a compelling case that the food industry’s next big contribution to public and planetary health may come not from new inventions, but from smarter choices about the products it already sells.

Subject of Research: Nutritional and environmental sustainability scoring of UK food and beverage manufacturers' product portfolios

Article Title: Food & drink manufacturers can greatly improve sustainability and healthiness of their products with small changes – Oxford research

Article References: Food & drink manufacturers can greatly improve sustainability and healthiness of their products with small changes – Oxford research. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: food manufacturers, sustainability, nutrition, University of Oxford, Nature Food, UK food retail, product portfolios, ESG reporting, food policy, ready meals, supermarkets, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive

The research, led by scientists analysing the composition and environmental profiles of thousands of packaged foods and drinks sold in the United Kingdom, took an approach that departs from the usual product-by-product view of food reformulation. Instead of asking whether a single sauce, biscuit or soft drink could be improved, the team modelled what would happen if manufacturers optimised their whole portfolios, shifting the overall mix of products they sell while adjusting recipes within them. This portfolio-level perspective captures trade-offs and synergies that isolated product studies inevitably miss, and it revealed that the combined opportunity is substantially greater than the sum of typical single-product estimates.

At the heart of the analysis is a simple but consequential observation: packaged foods and beverages made by large manufacturers account for a dominant share of what British households actually eat and drink. Small percentage changes in the salt, sugar, saturated fat and calorie content of these products, applied across hundreds of items and multiplied by enormous sales volumes, translate into large absolute reductions in nutrient intake at the population level. The same arithmetic applies to environmental pressures. Modest reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water requirements embedded in high-volume products can compound into meaningful national sustainability gains.

Technically, the researchers combined nutritional composition data for individual products with environmental impact estimates linked to their ingredient lists, applying optimisation frameworks that search for feasible reformulation and product-mix scenarios within realistic commercial constraints. Rather than assuming manufacturers can radically redesign every item, the models respected the boundaries of familiar product categories and consumer expectations, identifying changes that keep foods recognisable and palatable while still lowering their health and environmental burdens. This constraint matters, because the most successful reformulation programmes in history, such as the steady reduction of salt in bread and processed foods, succeeded precisely because consumers barely noticed the changes.

The results indicate that large nutritional improvements are achievable without any change in purchasing behaviour whatsoever. If the products on the shelves become modestly lower in salt, sugar and saturated fat, and somewhat less calorie-dense, the average shopper’s diet improves automatically, simply by continuing to buy as before. This is a crucial policy insight. Public health campaigns that rely on individual behaviour change have historically produced small and uneven effects, while structural changes to the food supply reach everyone, including the households least engaged with nutrition labels and dietary advice.

Equally striking is the study’s finding that nutritional and environmental goals are not inherently in conflict. A long-standing tension in food policy debates assumes that making food healthier might require more resource-intensive ingredients, or that cutting emissions might compromise nutrition. The portfolio analysis suggests the opposite: well-designed strategies can advance both objectives at once, particularly when manufacturers rebalance their ranges toward plant-rich formulations, reduce reliance on the most emissions-intensive ingredients, and trim excess calories and salt simultaneously. Some products offer wins on one dimension and losses on another, and the optimisation approach explicitly accounts for these trade-offs, but across entire portfolios the opportunities for mutual reinforcement dominate.

The implications for corporate strategy are significant. Food manufacturers face mounting regulatory pressure, from salt and sugar reduction programmes to mandatory environmental disclosure rules and net-zero commitments. The study effectively provides those companies with a quantitative map of where the biggest returns lie, suggesting that prioritising high-volume, high-impact categories delivers far more benefit per unit of reformulation effort than scattered token changes across a range. It also implies that voluntary industry pledges, which critics have often dismissed as toothless, could become genuinely transformative if they were set and monitored at the level of whole portfolios rather than individual flagship products.

For policymakers, the research offers a framework for accountability that matches the structure of the modern food industry. Food standards agencies currently tend to set category-level targets, such as maximum salt content per hundred grams of soup or breakfast cereal. The new findings suggest that supplementing these with portfolio-level metrics, measuring the average nutritional and environmental profile of everything a company sells, would better capture the cumulative effect of reformulation and give regulators a clearer picture of progress over time. Such metrics could be woven into national strategies on obesity, cardiovascular disease and agricultural emissions, creating a common scoreboard for government and industry alike.

The study also carries a message about the pace of change. Reformulation is not instantaneous; recipes must be tested, supply chains adjusted, and consumer acceptance secured. But because the required changes are incremental rather than revolutionary, they can be implemented steadily across reporting cycles, and their effects compound year after year. The researchers’ modelling suggests that within a realistic implementation horizon, portfolio-wide programmes could deliver reductions in population salt, sugar and saturated fat exposure that dwarf what has been achieved through decades of piecemeal product launches marketed as healthier alternatives.

Ultimately, the study reframes the corporate product portfolio as one of the most powerful levers available for improving both human and planetary health. Agriculture, retail and consumer choice all matter, but the composition of packaged food, decided in the research kitchens and ingredient sourcing offices of a few dozen multinational manufacturers, shapes the diets of an entire nation. Harnessing that lever deliberately, the authors conclude, could deliver large nutritional and environmental improvements across the food system faster and more reliably than almost any other intervention currently on the policy table.

Subject of Research: Portfolio-wide nutritional and environmental optimisation of products by major UK food and beverage manufacturers

Article Title: Large nutritional and environmental improvements can be achieved across the product portfolios of major UK food and beverage manufacturers

Article References: Hammond, E., Bandy, L., Milner-Gulland, E. J., Pechey, R., Rayner, M., Scarborough, P., Jain, S., & Clark, M. (2026). Large nutritional and environmental improvements can be achieved across the product portfolios of major UK food and beverage manufacturers. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-026-01420-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43016-026-01420-2

Keywords: food reformulation, UK food manufacturers, nutrition, environmental sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions, public health, food policy, salt reduction, sugar reduction, sustainable diets, product portfolios, Nature Food