Company commitments and practices on nutrition and environmental sustainability in Ireland

INTRODUCTION: The Business Impact Assessment (BIA) tools were developed by INFORMAS to document companies’ commitments on population nutrition (BIA-Obesity) and environmental sustainability (BIA-Sustainability). As part of the EU-funded Food Systems that Support Transitions to Healthy and Sustainable Diets (FEAST) project, we used the BIA-Obesity and BIA-Sustainability to map the public commitments of a range of national and international food companies active in Ireland. METHODS: We selected companies (n = 39) across the packaged food, soft drinks, quick service restaurant, grocery retailers, infant formula, and catering industries. Selection was based primarily on the companies’ market shares in Ireland, as well as potential to compare findings across countries. We searched each company's website, annual reports, and other public sources, logging all commitments relevant to the domains of the BIAs. We then asked companies to provide evidence of any additional publicly available commitments not included in our data collection. Then we scored the final set commitments for each company in each domain. The domains were weighted differently in different industries based on current evidence on the impact of each industry. RESULTS: Within each industry, the results vary widely, with some companies making extensive and detailed public commitments while others made few if any public commitments. Many companies, especially larger multinational companies, make strong commitments on sustainability, while commitments to tackle obesity and non-communicable diseases still lag behind. CONCLUSIONS: There is still scope for food businesses to make more and clearer commitments on environmental sustainability and, especially, on population nutrition and health in Ireland. Now that a benchmark of companies’ commitments has been established, future work will focus on changing commitments over time, as well as, crucially, assessing practices related to these commitments.