Case Study: Unilever assesses nutrition across 17,000 products and drives reformulation with TIBCO Software's Spotfire DecisionSite

Spotfire Bakes and Brews Nutritional Reviews for Unilever

Unilever, a global consumer goods company with 400 brands sold in 150 countries, needed to score and review the nutritional content of its entire food and beverage portfolio — about 17,000 product recipes spread across nearly 300 dynamic brand databases. The challenge was to consolidate vast, frequently updated data, establish consistent nutritional benchmarks (for trans fat, saturated fat, sodium, and sugars), and enable fast, flexible analysis to guide reformulation and labeling decisions.

Unilever built a Nutrition Score Tool and used Spotfire DecisionSite to import and visualize key nutrient fields, run complex queries, and store reusable selections for quick reporting. The system has assessed over 17,000 products and guided reformulations across brands (e.g., Hellmann’s, Knorr, Lipton Iced Tea, Birds Eye), delivering measurable cuts in saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and sugar — examples include switching Birds Eye frying oil from 47.5% to 12% saturated fat, 10% sodium cuts in European soups, ~25% average sodium reductions for 130+ ANZ products, and 10% less sugar in ketchups — driving substantial portfolio-wide nutritional improvements.

Unilever

Frans van der Sman

Data Manager