Being able to track and measure the impact of business on food and diets is key to ensuring that businesses make positive contributions to nutrition and food systems. This report maps out 21 initiatives engaging business around nutrition-related commitments, and 12 mechanisms for assessing their impact. Rather than improving accountability, this can often lead to confusion and reporting fatigue. To discuss options for better coordination and more effective tracking of businesses, GAIN and the Consumer Goods Forum hosted a workshop in November 2018. The short-term and long-term solutions are summarised below, with full details in Section 5. In addition to more coordinated reporting on nutrition, the actions arising from this report are also intended to help secure commitments from governments, civil society, and business at the 2020 Global Nutrition Summit in Japan, and to accelerate progress to end malnutrition by 2030 in line with the Global Goals.
Short-term:
- Include nutrition in the Reporting Exchange platform
- Explore options to share or leverage data collected around food and nutrition as part of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
Long-term:
- Better alignment in the collection and use of data for new and existing initiatives
- Use common language and metrics for any selfreporting mechanisms
- Include retailers in accountability frameworks as out of home consumption plays an in important role in nutrition
- Leverage expertise of tech/ICT companies to support innovative approaches to data collection and management
- Measure the impact of national and local companies on nutrition, especially in emerging markets
