State of Sustainability Podcast

Solo Episode: Nutrient Density and the Sustainability Opportunity

SAIF: Welcome back to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm recording from a hotel room — I'm on my semi-annual US tour for the State of Sustainability Summit, getting ready to host 40 of the world's largest food and beverage companies and their sustainability teams in Chicago for a day of the deep, nerdy, geeky topics we love at these summits. It's the seventh or eighth edition of the event, and I'm genuinely excited for it.

Today I want to talk about nutrient density and nutrition in the context of sustainability teams.

This came up in our last episode with Katherine David, CEO of WRAP, and it's also a topic my friend Henry Dimbleby raises regularly — both in private conversations and in public. It's on the rise on the agenda of food and beverage companies more broadly. And I have an ulterior motive for wanting to focus on it.

I think sustainability teams need to find opportunities to lead meaningful impact — to find transformative topics they can genuinely own. Much of the traditional work sustainability teams have been doing over the last few years is going to migrate to other functions: absorbed into procurement, finance, or operations. And a significant portion of it is going to be automated, because it lends itself well to AI and agentic workflows. For those reasons, I think sustainability may need to step back, reconfigure, and identify new territory. Nutrition and nutrient density is one of those territories, and I want to explain why.

What We're Actually Talking About

Nutrition and nutrient density are not exactly the same thing. I'd break the challenge into three distinct components.

The first is nutritional design — what should the product actually contain? What does a great healthy food product look like today? Within that sits the nutrient density question: what do the caloric and nutrient ratios look like for this product?

The second is nutritional reporting — an increasingly important and evolving space. We'll come back to this.

The third is portfolio-level decision-making — which ingredients are we using across which products and markets? Where are we over-indexed on things we shouldn't be, and under-indexed on things we should? How do we reconfigure what we're making and selling as a business?

Right now, nutritional design sits squarely within R&D. Nutritional reporting is an emerging space — in some businesses it's owned centrally, sometimes within R&D, occasionally within sustainability, and sometimes not owned clearly by anyone. Portfolio-level decision-making, in my observation, is largely unmanaged in most businesses. I'll say more on that.

Why R&D Can't Own This Alone

In a top-tier Fortune 500 food and beverage business, R&D teams can be large and capable enough to own more of this agenda. But I don't think that will work for every business, for two reasons.

First, R&D tends to be underloved relative to its weight in the organisation. A friend of mine — a Chief R&D Officer at a major food and beverage company, who'll know who he is when he listens to this — described it well. He said R&D owns the secret sauce of every food business, literally. It owns the spec, the IP, the core intellectual value. The kind of information that, if it leaked — think the actual ingredient profile of Heinz ketchup or Coca-Cola — would be catastrophic. R&D holds those pearls. But it's rarely given the resources, tools, prestige, or priority to be on the front foot on new strategic topics. It's treated more like a safety function: you want it running quietly, you only hear about it when something goes wrong. Sustainability, by contrast, has had a high profile and a front-foot mandate for much of the last decade.

Second, smaller businesses may not have large R&D teams at all. They may have commoditised product lines but will still face nutritional reporting requirements and the commercial pressure of a portfolio that isn't optimised for today's health environment.

Why This Matters Commercially

There are several powerful commercial forces converging on this topic.

Retail channel access is already being gated by health credentials. HFSS rules in the UK, the Make America Healthy Again agenda, evolving FDA requirements — front-of-pack health indicators are increasingly going to determine shelf placement. Leading with health credentials is becoming table stakes for any food and beverage business that wants to maintain its retail position.

The GLP-1 wave is a different kind of driver. For much of the last two decades, the health agenda in food was predicated on a behavioural shift — we assumed more consumers would choose healthier options over time. GLP-1 is pharmacological. Your body simply needs certain things because of the drug you're on. That wave is far more reliable and predictable than behavioural change. We're already seeing spending shifts: around 20 million US consumers are currently on GLP-1 drugs, and that's reshaping what they're buying. Importantly, this is not as neatly concentrated in high-income groups as healthy eating preferences have historically been — it's more broadly distributed across income levels.

Premium pricing is real and still has significant runway. The healthy food market is growing at roughly 10% CAGR depending on region. Clean, high-quality-label products are commanding meaningful pricing premiums, and the stores and brands built around this positioning are growing.

You can see this playing out in recent M&A. Two recent acquisitions illustrate the dynamic well: Danone acquiring Huel, and Unilever acquiring Grüns. The Huel acquisition looks somewhat defensive to me — Danone bolstering its nutritional credentials and reducing reliance on less healthy product lines, a move they've been making gradually across the portfolio for some time. Unilever's Grüns acquisition looks more offensive. Unilever has been shedding its food business — first ice cream, then Hellmann's and Knorr — and is building a portfolio centred on wellness brands. Grüns fits that thesis directly.

This is analogous to what we saw a decade ago, when companies were acquiring businesses with strong sustainability credentials — think Ben & Jerry's or Green & Black's. Now the acquisition logic is the same but the lens has shifted decisively to health and wellness.

Where Sustainability Teams Can Play a Role

Going back to the three components: nutritional design sits primarily in R&D, so I'm not going to argue sustainability should own that. But the other two are worth examining.

Nutritional reporting falls naturally within the competence space sustainability teams have already built. They're already interfacing with bill-of-materials data, supply chain data, external reporting requirements, and audit processes. Some businesses are standing up ESG controllers — analogous to finance controllers — who manage data flows into the reporting stack. Others manage this within the sustainability function itself. Either way, that same infrastructure could serve nutritional reporting. The reason is straightforward: the retailers and supply chain partners demanding emissions data and environmental data are often the same ones who will require clear, structured nutritional data. The data exchange that now carries emissions, water intensity, and environmental metadata could also carry nutritional metadata. Sustainability teams are well placed to manage that.

That said, I wouldn't position nutritional reporting as a long-term growth area for sustainability teams. Automation will progressively absorb most of it. It's a bridging opportunity, not a destination.

Portfolio-level decision-making is the most interesting opportunity, and also the most striking white space. In speaking with most of the large food and beverage businesses, I've found that very few have an easy way to optimise across their portfolio — to say, these products in these geographies should look like this, the same products in other geographies should look like that, and some things should be stripped out across the board. This is not a practiced muscle. There aren't systems, infrastructure, or teams that can do this at the push of a button.

This has come into sharp relief for me through conversations about EPR. Dave Clark at Amcor put it well: the likely answer for a US business is a different packaging mix west of the Mississippi versus east of the Mississippi, because state-level EPR regimes will vary significantly. The same logic applies to nutrition — different markets will have more or less aggressive nutritional regulation; different retailers will set different requirements. The portfolio optimisation challenge is structurally similar in both cases.

For mid-sized consumer businesses, EPR-related fees are estimated at $20–30 million annually. For a Fortune 500 food and beverage company, it could be several hundred million a year. The financial stakes are high enough that this optimisation muscle will have to be built — and the same muscle will be needed for nutrition.

This is also where AI and automation become an asset rather than a threat to sustainability teams. AI can handle the data aggregation and the first-pass recommendations. But you'd still want humans in the loop for two reasons: no organisation would pipe automated recommendations straight into decision-making without human review; and someone still needs to build the overarching logic — the systems thinking that says, here's the dividing line, here's how we now structure decisions across this dimension. That framing work — nuanced, business-specific, context-aware — is something sustainability teams are genuinely well-placed to do.

The Broader Argument

I want to zoom out and make a broader point about what sustainability functions are actually for.

Sustainability is a transformation capability more than it is a permanent function. If you trace the history of business functions, procurement and sales are probably the Adam and Eve — the first person selling oranges, then the first person buying oranges to sell on. Sustainability will never have the same permanence or primacy as those core functions. But it can play a crucial role as a capability that helps a business move from one state to another.

That's the role sustainability has been playing on the environmental agenda. Most businesses recognise they need to make a shift, but it's not an endless journey — it's a finite transformation. You want to hit specific targets by 2030, 2035, 2050. You want to get certain numbers down. And then, ideally, it's absorbed into business as usual. Different functions get upskilled. The work runs on its own.

That means sustainability teams have built a genuinely valuable skill set: establishing baselines, setting goals, building initiative plans, upskilling delivery teams, communicating externally, and engineering the shift. All of that is exactly what food and beverage businesses will need for their nutritional transformation.

Sustainability is not going to own the nutrition agenda outright, nor should it try. R&D will remain central. But sustainability can play the crucial role of managing the transformation — elevating the conversation, establishing baselines and targets, defining initiatives and glide paths, communicating externally, coordinating across procurement, finance, and R&D, and bringing portfolio-level intelligence to the business in a way no other function currently can.

I'll be keeping a close eye on this topic and you'll hear more from me on it. If you have thoughts — because I'm sure many of you are already thinking about this — please email me at saif@altruistiq.com. My address will be in the show notes.

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