Chatham House report
Published 8 July 2020
Updated 17 December 2020
ISBN: 978 1 78413 404 4
Malnutrition acts as a brake on the development of individuals, communities and economies around the world. This report is the first of its kind to reveal the hidden costs of malnutrition for business, and the extent to which these costs are recognized and addressed by multinational companies (MNCs).
In order to gauge the level of corporate activity on nutrition, the nature of this activity, and the extent to which companies are reporting on it, we undertook a desk-based review of a sample of companies and their online literature: annual reports, sustainability reports, website content and other resources published on company websites. This review cannot be used to draw conclusions on the extent and nature of company activity on nutrition, but rather the extent and nature of nutrition-related activity on which they report.
As our focus was mainly on multinational companies (MNCs) with operations in low- and middle-income countries, we reviewed the top 100 non-financial transnational companies ranked by foreign assets, as identified by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),228 and the top five companies in each industry as identified by the Fortune Global 500.229 Additional companies with which we were in contact for this project – through semi-structured interview participants, workshop participants and members of the Research Funders Network – were also sampled. In total, 180 companies were sampled.
We identified the group website for each company and then used the website’s search function to search for ‘nutrition’. Companies without websites, or without English-language information, were omitted from the list. For each company, we reviewed the top 10 results and identified any information indicating the company was taking action specifically on nutrition in the workplace at group level, and if it was implementing activities in its supply chains or within the local/global community. We also reviewed the company’s annual and sustainability reports from the past five years for mentions of nutrition.
We then conducted a second search within these documents (the top 10 results for ‘nutrition’ together with the annual reports and sustainability reports from the past five years) to include other key terms related to nutrition: for example, ‘underweight’ and ‘undernutrition’, ‘overweight’ and ‘obesity’, ‘food’, ‘breastfeeding’, ‘canteen’, ‘BMI’. In a third search, we looked for mentions of related areas, such as ‘WASH’ and ‘health’. Finally, we conducted a fourth search for ‘nutrition + [name of company]’ and ‘nutrition + [name of company] + report’ using Google. Where relevant results were returned for resources published on the company’s website, these were included.
Table 10 gives an indicative, though not exhaustive, list of the types of activity included under each category.
|
Intervention area |
Indicative activities included under intervention area |
|---|---|
|
Nutrition education or training programmes |
Workforce
|
|
Supply chain
|
|
|
Global/local communities
|
|
|
Breastfeeding support |
Workforce
|
|
Global/local communities
|
|
|
Manufacture and/or sale of nutritional products and services |
Global/local communities
|
|
On-site food provision and community feeding programmes |
Workforce
|
|
Global/local communities
|
|
|
Incentives for healthy eating |
Workforce
|
|
Nutritional status monitoring |
Workforce
|
|
Global/local communities
|
|
|
Nutrition-focused partnerships in the community or at population level |
Civil society organizations (CSOs)
|
|
Donors, funders and UN agencies
|
|
|
Public and government
|
|
|
Private/corporate
|
|
|
Research and academic
|
|
|
Investment in agricultural production and value chains |
Supply chain
|
|
Global/local communities
|
