Small Portfolio Changes Could Help Food Manufacturers Improve Health and Sustainability
Food and beverage manufacturers may not need to overhaul their entire product ranges to achieve meaningful improvements in nutrition and environmental sustainability, according to new research from the University of Oxford.
The peer-reviewed study, published in Nature Food in September 2026, assessed the product portfolios of 44 major food and beverage manufacturers operating in the UK. Together, the companies represented approximately half of the UK food retail market, allowing researchers to examine how changes within existing product ranges could contribute to healthier and more environmentally sustainable food systems.
Researchers assigned nutritional and environmental scores to products on a per-100-gram basis and compared products both within manufacturers' portfolios and across companies competing in similar food categories. The analysis found substantial differences between apparently comparable products, indicating that manufacturers may have room to improve their portfolios without necessarily withdrawing from established product categories.
The research team then modelled what would happen if manufacturers replaced some of their poorest-performing products with alternatives that achieved scores closer to the average for the relevant category. For many of the companies assessed, changing 10% or less of the product line was sufficient to achieve more than half of the total potential improvement available in either nutritional quality or environmental sustainability.
Large Portfolios Offer Room for Targeted Changes
The study linked 15,673 food and beverage products from the foodDB database to 44 of the UK's 50 largest manufacturers, covering 396 brands. Researchers said the linkage represented 97% of the sales value captured for those manufacturers in the relevant Euromonitor data.
Companies examined included major UK retailers with extensive own-brand ranges, such as Tesco, Sainsbury's and Iceland, alongside multinational food groups including Nestlé, Mars, Mondelez, General Mills and Kellanova. Unilever was also assessed as part of the broader analysis of companies with diverse portfolios.
Rather than identifying one company as consistently more sustainable or nutritious than its competitors, the researchers found considerable variation between categories and individual products. A manufacturer performing relatively well in one segment could have significantly more room for improvement elsewhere.
That variability has practical implications for manufacturers. Instead of treating portfolio sustainability as a company-wide exercise requiring simultaneous reformulation of thousands of products, businesses could potentially identify a smaller group of products responsible for a disproportionate share of their nutritional or environmental performance.
Reformulation, changes in ingredients, the introduction of alternative products, adjustments to product mix or the replacement of poorly performing products could therefore form part of a targeted strategy.
Supermarket Own Brands Could Have Significant Influence
The researchers found particularly substantial potential among two large British supermarkets. Their own-brand products together represented 28.9% of sales value included in the analysis, and both showed considerable scope to improve environmental and nutritional outcomes.
Companies with broader product ranges generally have more options for changing the composition of their portfolios. By contrast, manufacturers concentrated in narrow categories, including some snack and energy drink producers, tended to have less scope for improvement through portfolio substitution alone.
This distinction is important because the study examines changes in what companies sell rather than suggesting that every food category can achieve the same level of improvement.
A diversified manufacturer may be able to shift sales or product development toward existing lower-impact alternatives. A company focused almost entirely on one type of product may instead have to rely more heavily on reformulation, new ingredients, or changes to production and sourcing.
Connecting nutrition and environmental performance
The study also highlights the potential value of evaluating environmental sustainability and nutrition together.
Food companies increasingly face expectations to provide information about greenhouse gas emissions, supply chains and wider environmental impacts. At the same time, policymakers and public health organizations continue to focus on nutritional composition, including sugar, salt, saturated fat and calorie content.
Historically, these issues have often been addressed through separate strategies. The Oxford analysis suggests portfolio-level assessments could provide companies, policymakers and investors with a way to consider both dimensions when evaluating food products and corporate performance.
Lead author Eleanor Hammond said the research was designed to examine how much food and beverage manufacturers could contribute to healthier and more sustainable food systems through changes within the products they already sell.
Co-author Michael Clark, Associate Professor in Sustainable Food Solutions at Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and a researcher with the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, said manufacturers could begin making such changes independently rather than waiting for government intervention.
Implications for Reporting and Regulation
The findings also arrive amid debate over how governments should monitor the health and environmental performance of the food industry.
According to the Oxford researchers, the methodology could potentially support government monitoring of nutrition and environmental outcomes as well as corporate sustainability reporting. Clark also pointed to possible applications in reporting frameworks such as the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.
For companies, the analysis provides another potential approach to portfolio management. Product-level data could be used to identify where relatively limited interventions might generate larger improvements, allowing sustainability teams to prioritize products or categories rather than applying identical targets across an entire business.
However, the research represents a modelling exercise rather than evidence of what would happen to consumer purchasing patterns following product changes. Decisions to discontinue, reformulate or replace products would also depend on factors including consumer demand, price, ingredient availability, manufacturing requirements and commercial performance.
The study nevertheless indicates that the scale of change required to improve a company's overall portfolio may sometimes be smaller than expected.
For food and beverage manufacturers under growing pressure to address both environmental impacts and public health, identifying the relatively small number of products with the greatest potential for improvement could provide a practical starting point.
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