Nestle’s Equatorial Africa region (EAR) on Wednesday (23 May 2012) launched a consumer awareness campaign focusing on nutrition and the impact of nutrient deficiencies and lifestyle diseases.
Nestle’s Equatorial Africa region (EAR) on Wednesday (23 May 2012) launched a consumer awareness campaign focusing on nutrition and the impact of nutrient deficiencies and lifestyle diseases.
Listen to your body is the nationwide campaign in Kenya, which will also act as a call to action for individuals to start paying closer attention to their health and lifestyle choices. Its objective is to educate the general public about nutrition, especially the outcome of micronutrients deficiencies and lifestyle diseases on their general wellbeing.
Pierre Trouilhat, CEO of Nestle EAR, said they embarked on this initiative to generate awareness of common nutritional deficiencies and their related symptoms and to spread the campaign message.
“This campaign encourages consumers to be more attuned to their bodies, to understand fundamental signs that the body may be providing from time to time. The campaign suggests a simple call action, a simple everyday conversation that the consumers can have their bodies in order to better understand themselves and their health,” Pierre said.
Speaking at the same event, Ruth Oniang’o, chairperson of the food security and nutrition thematic group, said women, especially mothers, are crucial on the issue of nutrition because most of the time it is they who make meal decisions in their homes.
“Mothers and women guardians are key to this campaign and we want to encourage all mothers to use this campaign to make the nutrition change their names,” she said.
This campaign will target the general public as an ongoing countrywide campaign. Billboards have already been erected in strategic locations around Nairobi and TV commercials have started featuring on local stations.
As part of the engagement strategy, Nestle has launched the Nutrimovil, a caravan that will go on a grassroots road show where people will get the opportunity to learn about the importance of nutrition in their lives and benefit from health checks. Leaflets with key nutritional information will also be distributed in strategic locations.
Internally Nestle has developed a system to continuously monitor the existing products portfolio for their nutritional content with regards to the public health sensitive ingredients like salt, fats and sugar.
Phyllis Obote, health and wellness manager at Nestle, said the organisation has “a compressive nutrition strategy that focuses on balance, understanding and responsible pleasure in our products”.
Pierre Trouilhat added: “This shows a clear commitment by our management to single-mindedly focus on providing solutions that improve the health and wellbeing of our consumers.
“And the reason is because we are not here to simply provide products for our consumers, but rather we make it our central mission to focus our efforts to combat the dual problem of malnutrition and obesity that prevails at an alarming rate across the globe.”
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