Paulus Verschuren is deputy director of the Unilever Health Institute in the Netherlands. He is also chairman of the board of directors of the International Life Sciences Institute, ILSI Europe, and a member of the board of trustees of ILSI Global.
Verschuren says that innovation is unavoidable because the key drivers are the consumers. Their needs and wants are changing, in relation to nutrition and health in particular. Innovation is a response to consumer needs and wants for foods that taste good, are more convenient and which are increasingly more healthy. Ignoring the consumer, or misinterpreting their message, is commercially very unwise.
For Unilever, the route to any new product starts in the shop or supermarket, with market researchers talking to shoppers. This will throw up a whole range of opinions, he says, which are interpreted by a team of specialists qualified in the science of consumer experience. The team defines what ideas should move forward into R&D.
Chefs test the recipes that are developed and then all relevant operating divisions, including the Health Institute, work hand in glove with each other to bring the products to market.
This means the company must maintain a strong R&D department that can carry concepts forward; with a total commitment by all staff to the need for change, so all opportunities are properly explored; and strong internal leadership in order to keep developments on track.
Social responsibility
But a stream of new products means more advertising, which means more temptation and more eating. So where does the drive for profit stop and social responsibility take over?
To answer that question, Verschuren uses one word: reputation.
"If any proposed course of action threatens our standing in the market place,“ he says, "we will not go down that road. Reputation is very fragile. It takes a long time to nurture and is easily damaged. We will not jeopardise our status for profit. In the long term, reputation can do more for profit than products, while recovering a company's lost position will dent that profit anyway. Unilever's ambition is to become the best in the world, and a good reputation is key to that aim. The Unilever Health Institute is a global centre of excellence for nutrition and health and so contributes to the overall status.“
Today, what is Unilever's attitude to the rising number of allergies that the public suffers from and the subject of obesity?
"Allergies are a very complex issue,“ says Verschuren. "People often react quite differently to the same stimulus and it is difficult to set a minimum level of an ingredient to avoid triggering an allergy. But the subject is under intense study by the industry.
"Obesity, on the other hand, is the prime responsibility of the individual. But it has now become a global epidemic that needs a concerted effort by all stakeholders to combat this negative health trend. It is even a problem in developing countries, where coping with obesity adds to the existing burden of treating the under-nourished.“
One in every six people in the world is overweight and more people are overweight than underweight. The problem affects not only adults but to an increasing extent children as well. The social consequences of obesity are high: it is the cause of over three-quarters of all cases of type-2 diabetes and of one-third of all cases of cancer and cardio-vascular disease. In some countries 10 percent of the healthcare costs are attributable to excess weight.
Although there is a tendency to lay the blame mainly on the food industry for this, the causes lie over a much broader front. People are getting less exercise as both home and workplace become more automated. Cars and public transport replace walking or cycling. Computer games have replaced active sports.
In the education system, time devoted to athletic lessons is being reduced while the higher level of prosperity means fewer restrictions on what we can buy.
Cholesterol war
The war on cholesterol also goes on. In Western societies, coronary heart disease is a killer second only to cancer. For a British man of 40, cutting cholesterol by 10percent reduces the risk of coronary artery disease by half. So the Unilever Health Institute is at the forefront of developing cholesterol-reducing spreads such as Flora Pro-activ, which is based on naturally-occurring plant sterol esters.
Its popular olive oil, Bertolli, contains anti-oxidants, which together with the unsaturated fat in the oil, provide excellent benefits to the cardiovascular system and help spread the life-enhancing benefits of the Mediterranean diet.
Unilever is currently reviewing its portfolio of products and assessing them for salt, fat, sugar and energy content. It is also looking at the fit of its product range with consumers' health concerns. But, for all foods, it says that labelling needs to change. Information should be presented more simply while a system needs to be developed to make choice easier when a shopper is faced with a number of similar products on a supermarket shelf. The food industry also needs more information about what food does to the body.
Verschuren points out that Unilever cannot change the world on its own, although one gets the feeling that it would like to. And implementing change is a long-term task. Encouraging the world to accept lower salt levels will take time as, for example, did the change from full cream to skimmed milk. Verschuren says his family today would not enjoy full cream milk. But the company can lead and develop such initiatives in conjunction with other responsible companies.
But all the food industry's efforts to satisfy its consumers are being restricted at the moment by proposed European law. This will impose strict controls on health claims attached to functional foods and will require that such claims are fully supported by research findings. It will constrict the climate for innovation by restricting what a company can say about its products.
Verschuren says the situation has been spoiled through some claims by others that had no scientific basis. It is vital for consumer trust, he says, that every claim is supported by scientific evidence, a view that Unilever has always adhered to. Consumers are entitled to more information and science should be shared because nutritional science is one of the most complex subjects in the curriculum. As a stakeholder in the welfare of its population, the EU has to play its part alongside academia, food organisations and the companies that make up the food industry.
Research commitment
In general, Unilever has been committed for a long time to innovation in research. At the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, its researchers investigated the effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids on heart and circulatory disease. The company says this can be considered to be the beginning of science-based food engineering and the start of awareness in the community of the importance of good nutrition in modern preventive healthcare.
This led to the development of Flora/Becel spread as just one example of the company's commitment to improving its offerings. Flora/Becel was launched in the early 1960s in response to a request from the medical community in the Netherlands to reduce the amount of saturated fats in spreads. It needed a new technology to manufacture the spreads. But the company used the results from sound scientific research to convince health care professionals and consumers to change and, now, Flora/Becel is an established global brand with a high level of trust, and has been so for a long time.
For many years, the annual Unilever Research Prizes have encouraged high-quality scientific research and helped promote stronger links between the company and the universities.
More recently, Unilever helped found the Wageningen Centre for Food Sciences, a national technology institute in the Netherlands. In co-operation with Nestlé and Danone, Unilever also helped found the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform. The initiative now includes 18 members from the international food industry. Last year, the company won the Royal Award for Food Innovation presented by the Development Agency East Netherlands.
The Health Institute was set up in its present form by Unilever as part of an initiative to establish a centre of excellence on nutrition, health and functional foods founded on a strong science base. Today, functional foods, or foods for health, present a wealth of opportunities for both the company and the food industry as demand grows internationally.
In the future, as science moves forward and the secrets of the human genome are unlocked, it will investigate how the individual's genetic make-up affects the response to diet. This will probably lead to many opportunities for proactive public health strategies worldwide. And while genomics and proteomics will identify more and more targets for addressing consumer needs, biotechnology will strive to find the minimum intervention to meet those needs.
And Paulus Verschuren says the Unilever Health Institute will be right in the forefront of it all.
For more information, visit www.unilever.com
