Tesco sets out four-year plan for healthy eating targets

Tesco has outlined a set of new plans between now and 2025 to help customers eat more healthily going forward.

The supermarket’s plans will include making improvements to its health profile of products, changing promotions and pricing to “remove barriers” to buying healthy food and a further expansion of its plant-based ranges.

Additionally, the company will try to increase its sales of healthy products as a proportion of total sales to 65% by 2025, up from 58% in 2021.

The group also plans to increase sales of plant-based meat alternatives by 300% by 2025, as well as increase the percentage of ready meals that contain “at least one” of the recommended five a day to 66% by 2025.

The new targets are said to be a “culmination” of 18 months of work to understand how the average UK weekly shopping basket “could be made more healthy”, and to develop plans that build further on Tesco’s existing health programme.

To meet the targets, Tesco’s strategy will focus on removing “billions” of calories and thousands of tonnes of salt, fat and sugar from products, without affecting taste, as part of a rolling programme of reformulation.

Since 2018, Tesco has already removed more than 50 billion calories from its products, focusing on some of the categories which contribute the most calories to families’ shopping baskets, such as ready meals, biscuits, pies and cakes.

Ken Murphy, group CEO, Tesco, said: “Customers are telling us they want to eat a more healthy, sustainable diet, but without having to stretch the weekly shopping budget. By making even very small changes to the items they put in their basket week in week out, we can help them make that change.

“We’ve worked hard to help our customers eat healthily and we’re proud of our track record, and it’s clear we can do more. Today we are sharing our stretching new ambitions on health, and committing to reporting our progress against them.”