First Lady Michelle Obama joined Walmart executives last week to help launch the company’s Nutrition Charter, an initiative that proposes a number of changes by Walmart to offer more nutritious food products, lower the cost of healthy foods, and provide consumers with better information about healthy food options.  These changes are the types of improvements critical to achieving the primary goal of Let’s Move! – solving the problem of childhood obesity within a generation.  

Walmart’s new Nutrition Charter has the potential to have a transformative impact on the market place and help families across America put healthier, more affordable food on their tables. The Nutrition Charter is the result of over a year of work together between Let’s Move! and Walmart. Here are its three major actions:

• Reformulate products to improve nutrition by 2015.  Reformulating thousands, of everyday packaged food items by 2015 by reducing sodium 25 percent and added sugars 10 percent, and by removing all remaining industrial produced trans fats.  The company will work with suppliers to improve the nutritional quality of national food brands and its Great  Value private brand in key product categories to complete their reformulations.
• Make healthy food more affordable.  Walmart is committed to reducing the cost of fruits and vegetables and the healthier options. 
• Empower consumers to make informed choices by implementing a healthy seal. In addition to their strong support for a meaningful front of pack label, Walmart is developing a healthy seal that will make it easier for customers to identify health products and quickly make a healthy choice. 

Here’s an excerpt from the First Lady’s remarks:

“This Nutrition Charter promises a real change that can have a fundamental impact in how our kids eat, you see, because when parents have the information they need about the products they buy, that puts them back in charge, so they can make good decisions for their families.  

When kids are consuming these products every day, those reductions in sugar, and salt and trans-fat can really add up.  When healthier options are finally affordable, that can affect every single meal a child eats, whether it’s adding fruit at breakfast, or whole wheat bread at lunch, or some more veggies on the plate at dinner.  And when 140 million people a week are shopping at Walmart, then day by day, and meal by meal, all these small changes can start to make a big difference for our children’s health.”

Making small steps in the right direction possible: that’s what Let’s Move is all about. Visit Walmart’s page to learn more about the Nutrition Charter and changes you might see soon at a store near you.