Geneva, 8 December 2021 – Members of the International Food & Beverage Alliance (IFBA) have developed the first-ever collective commitment by the food industry to implement globally set standardized targets for sodium reduction in manufactured foods.
In a letter to World Health Organization Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, IFBA members pledged to reduce sodium in their global portfolios by 2025 and 2030 in key categories of products that are frequently consumed and are important contributors to sodium intakes within their respective categories.
Reducing sodium intake is a key global public health priority identified by the WHO as a measure to help promote a healthy diet and accelerate progress towards achieving several of the global NCD targets and Sustainable Development Goals. The IFBA Global Sodium Reduction Commitment aims to support these goals and builds on members’ significant individual progress to reduce sodium in consumers’ diets over the last two decades.
We support the WHO’s Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases 2013-2020 designed to achieve a global target for a 30% relative reduction in mean population intake of salt, with the aim of achieving a target of less than 5 g of salt per day by 2025. Since adoption of that plan in 2013, IFBA members have reduced sodium in their products commensurate with this target, contributing significantly to reducing sodium in consumers’ diets.
“This commitment represents another step in progressing the commitments IFBA members first made to the WHO in 2008 to improve global health and nutrition,” said Rocco Renaldi, IFBA Secretary-General. “The global sodium reduction targets, which apply not only to the reformulation of existing products, but also to new product development, will result in meaningful nutritional improvements in members’ product portfolios.”
The IFBA Global Sodium Reduction Commitment will be launched at the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit on 8 December 2021. The full commitment is available here.
