Coca-Cola European Partners’ sugar reduction journey

As part of our This is Forward Action on Drinks commitments, we made a series of promises to evolve our portfolio, helping people to manage the amount of sugar they consume and to make more informed choices about their diets.

We committed to:

• Reduce the sugar in our soft drinks by 10% between 2015 and 2020, in addition to the 5% reduction achieved in the previous five years
• Aim for 50% of our sales to come from low or no calorie drinks by 2025
• Continuously evolve our recipes and portfolio to offer a greater choice of drinks
• Make it easier for consumers to cut down on sugar with straightforward product information and smaller pack sizes

We’re less than half way through our sugar reduction journey, but we have already made some great progress against our commitments.

Firstly, through innovation and reformulation, we have reduced the average sugar per litre in our soft drinks’ portfolio by 11.1% since 2015 and by 15.8% since 2010. This equates to 160k tonnes of sugar being removed from our drinks since 2010.

Already this year, 45% of all the drinks we sold were low or no calorie. To achieve this, we have changed the recipes of 186 products to reduce sugar and have launched 435 new low and no calorie products since 2010. In fact, in 2018 alone, we launched 70 product reformulations to reduce sugar and calories, mainly in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Spain. These included several new zero sugar options, such as Monster Ultra, new Fanta flavours, new Diet Coke and Coca-Cola zero sugar flavours. 2018 also saw the launch of Fuze Tea, our popular ready-to-drink tea brand, with great taste and low sugar.

We’ve also been increasing the amount of sparkling soft drinks sold in packs that are 250ml or less. This figure stands at 5% today and we’re looking to increase this amount significantly by 2025. This year for instance, we launched new Sprite and Coca-Cola Light flavours in 250ml cans in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Also, in Belgium we launched 250ml PET mini-bottles for Fanta known as Fanta Balls. We will introduce these in other countries in 2019.

Finally, to provide people with even more information about our drinks, we’re committed to providing clear, easy-to-understand nutritional information on all of our packaging, including information about sugar and calorie content. Having joined the UK government’s voluntary colour-coded, front-of-pack nutrition labelling scheme in 2014, we began trialling colour-coded labelling in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands this year. The European Commission is currently looking into developing a single, consistent nutritional labelling scheme across Europe, and we hope these trials will make a positive contribution to this process.

We’re committed to continuing our journey to 2025, all the while ensuring we are offering consumers an even greater choice of drinks with reduced sugar.