Nestlé's Statement

Why is Nestlé supporting EPODE

Nestlé as a Nutrition, Health and Wellness Company is committed to encouraging a healthy lifestyle, which includes helping tackle the problem of overweight and obesity. This is done by offering consumers ever healthier and tasty products, allowing consumer to make an informed choice by providing meaningful labelling and marketing our products in a responsible way.
In addition Nestlé is engaged in various nutrition and healthy lifestyle programmes, which have reached more than 10 million people worldwide. The obesity pandemic, by its multi-causal character, calls for multi-stakeholder approaches. One of Nestlé's most important commitments is therefore our support of EPODE. It all started in 1992 when Nestlé France, as the first company, started to develop a long-term partnership with 2 major community programmes: FLEURBAIX-LAVENTIE VILLES SANTE and later with EPODE in 2004. We are now also supporting THAO in Spain and PAIDEIATROFI in Greece.

Multi-Stakeholder Programme

By providing some evidence that multi-stakeholders programmes involving the entire community can lead to a significant decrease or stabilization of the prevalence of children obesity, EPODE distinguishes itself from other projects. Nestlé find the concept very interesting and it is now a challenge to get a wider acceptance of the methodology in additional communities throughout Europe and to further develop monitoring tools for the evaluation of the projects. This is why Nestlé in 2007 decided to expand our EPODE commitments and to sponsor the European EPODE Network (EEN) with the aim to scale up EPODE and accelerate such initiatives by developing guidelines and disseminating good practices including Public/Private Partnerships. Partnership means not only economic support but also being involved in the "thinking process".
When we as Nestlé decide to support projects like EPODE/EEN it is because we also believe we can make a difference by bringing our knowledge, experience and science to the table. Encouraging good nutrition and healthy lifestyle makes good business sense and at the same time we can help kids to a healthy start in life. This is for us Creating Shared Value.
Creating value not only for the company but also for the society long term wise is Nestlé's approach to CSR. This is embedded in our core business strategy and not an add on.

More information about Nestlé's Creating Shared Value approach