Nestlé in society Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2015

Nestlé in society:
Creating Shared Value
Nutrition, health
and wellness
Rural development
Water
Environmental
sustainability
Human rights
and compliance
Our
people
Customer health and safety G4-DMA, Marketing communications G4-DMA, G4-PR7, Compliance G4-DMA (Product responsibility)
The EU Pledge
Launched in December 2007, the EU Pledge is a
voluntary initiative by leading food and beverage
companies to change food and beverage advertising to
children under the age of 12 in the European Union. It
consists of two main commitments:
• No advertising for food and beverage products to
children under the age of 12 on TV, print or the
internet, except for products which fulfil common
nutritional criteria; and
• No communication related to products in primary
schools, except where specifically requested by,
or agreed with, the school administration for
educational purposes.
These are minimum common standards that enable joint
monitoring and accountability. Individual companies can
apply corporate standards that go above and beyond
these common rules.
Through our new Policy, which was communicated to markets
during 2015 and launched in January 2016, we apply the EU
Pledge criteria globally. Where local or regionally agreed
pledges criteria are stricter, they are applied. If criteria are
lacking for a product category in the EU Pledge, we apply our
NNPS criteria.
It is important that our marketeers are aware of the impact
that our Nestlé Policy has on the communication of the foods
and beverages we sell. We will seek to continuously increase
knowledge and awareness of the criteria across our
organisation, and we are currently developing a web-based
tool to support internal understanding of responsible
marketing practices among our marketeers and external
agency partners.
We want our children’s brands to be responsibly
communicated to parents and children, providing a source of
enjoyment with foods and beverages they can trust. When it
comes to marketing confectionery, we aim to ensure that we
avoid placing marketing communications in media where 35%
of the audience is under 12 years old, and we do not create
marketing of primary appeal to children under that age. We
will apply global confectionery guidelines and checklists that
our marketing departments can use to ensure material that
they have created meets the standards required.
The marketing to children criteria can have a direct impact
on how we develop our foods and beverages, as well as our
associated marketing practices. As an example, we have
recently been engaged in renovation work in the ice cream
sector. Currently, 85% of our global children’s ice cream
portfolio meets EU Pledge nutritional criteria, which caps
children’s products at 110 calories. We plan to accelerate
reformulation of the children’s ice cream portfolio in the
other countries where we operate to achieve 80% by the
end of 2016.
Our Nestlé Policy states we will only use owned or licensed
characters appealing to children aged between 6 and 12 to
promote healthy, active lifestyles. Licensed characters that
could appeal to children under 12 cannot be used for foods
and beverages where they do not meet the EU Pledge
nutritional criteria.
A key element of our global Nestlé Policy is that we do not
conduct marketing communications in schools, except for
educational purposes that have been explicitly requested by
school authorities. This exception is only valid for students
aged 6-12 years old. In addition, our internal guidelines state
that any outdoor communication material that is placed within
50 metres of a kindergarten, primary school or playground
must only advertise foods and beverages that are nutritionally
compliant with our policy.
Both the Nestlé Communication Principles and the Nestlé
Policy clearly reference support for parents and the promotion
of healthy diets and lifestyles.
We remain open to comments and complaints from
consumers and external stakeholders. Tell us provides a formal
mechanism for receiving, processing, investigating and
responding to complaints from customers and the general
public about our policies and practices. Any complaint from
customers and the general public about content and visuals
relating to children will be received, processed, investigated
and responded to. One complaint about our marketing
practices (on gender discrimination) was received through
Tell us in 2015. The complaint was investigated but not upheld.
No complaints were received on our marketing to children.
Making voluntary commitments
Our policies are guided by a series of global, regional and
national commitments and pledges that aim to establish
industry consensus on minimum standards for marketing to
children.
IFBA commitment
As a member of the IFBA, Nestlé is committed to complying
with the IFBA Global Policy on Advertising and Marketing
Communications to Children (IFBA Global Policy). Each year,
IFBA engages a third party to monitor and report publicly on
members’ compliance with its policy.
The monitoring system ensures that children under 12 are
not targeted by non-compliant communications. We have
been successfully tracking compliance in previous years with
the 35% threshold in traditional media (TV, radio and print)
through internal auditing and external monitoring, the latter
conducted by Accenture.
In 2015:
• 71 Nestlé print publications were assessed in Singapore,
China, Brazil, South Africa and Russia;
• 355 television adverts were reviewed in Brazil, Colombia,
Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa, with an overall
compliance rate of 97%; and
• 83 websites were reviewed in four countries.
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