Target 2.2: End all forms of malnutrition
By 2030, end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age, and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Malnutrition includes the overweight side as well as undernutrition. Food and beverage manufacturers shape both through product formulation, marketing and formula-milk promotion. WHO and UNICEF find the 55 billion dollar formula industry reaches 51 percent of surveyed parents with marketing that violates the 1981 International Code. Owners have already voted on this. A ShareAction-led coalition of investors with 1.68 trillion dollars under management filed a 2024 Nestle resolution to set targets for healthier product sales. The resolution won 11 percent. Corporate political influence is a live obstacle. At a March 2026 meeting, Coca-Cola and other industry executives argued that front-of-pack warning labels were ineffective, and India's food regulator then dropped the proposal. Undernutrition still depends on governments and aid, so owners supply a necessary input and remove a necessary obstacle, but governments must also act.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Shareholders file health resolution at Nestle, ShareAction, 2024-03-14
- Nestle shareholder vote on health resolution: ShareAction response, ShareAction, 2024-04-18
- India wanted warning labels on chip packets, soda but big food fought back, Business Standard, 2026-08-25
- More than half of parents and pregnant women exposed to aggressive formula milk marketing, WHO/UNICEF, 2022-02-22
1 campaign on record
Set a target to raise the share of sales that come from healthier food and drink, and measure what counts as healthy against an accepted public health standard rather than the company's own definition.
With Legal and General Investment Management, Candriam, La Francaise Asset Management, VGZ, Guy's and St Thomas' Foundation
Result: Voted at the annual meeting on April 18, 2024. It won 11 percent support, with 88 percent against and 1 percent abstaining.
We found no documented change. ShareAction said after the vote that the direction of travel was clear, but neither source records Nestle adopting a sales target or changing its nutrition definition in response.
Shareholders file health resolution at Nestle, ShareAction, 2024-03-14
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.