Our team has a challenging but inspiring goal: to boost our environmental stewardship by improving and evaluating everything from packaging, waste reduction, water management, and ingredient sourcing.
Evolving Our Operations to Improve Our Environmental Footprint
We work to ensure that our products are sourced, manufactured, and distributed in the most sustainable way possible:
Harnessing the power of plants
With the global population expected to cross 9 billion by 2050, demand is expected to increase 74% for daily protein servings. As the world is more focused on climate change, people are looking for alternatives to animal-based proteins that contribute significantly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Plant-based proteins are considerably more efficient to grow, using less water and emitting less carbon, and producing more protein per acre than beef, eggs, or milk. These are among the main reasons that Herbalife Nutrition has been harnessing the power of plants for over 40 years.
At Herbalife Nutrition, 84% of protein products are plant-based, with primary ingredients being soy, pea, rice, and quinoa. Soy is the number-one ingredient in many of our products, including most varieties of Formula 1, our flagship product. Soy is one of the only complete plant-based proteins since it contains all nine essential amino acids that our bodies cannot produce on their own. Soy is also significantly more efficient to grow, using less water and emitting less carbon, and producing more protein per acre than beef, eggs, or milk.
Herbalife Nutrition’s annual soy usage per year is roughly 30K metric tons and is expected to grow at an estimated rate of 6-8% annually. We work with soy suppliers committed to sourcing responsibly. We have the goal to source only soy ingredients and palm oil from companies certified by the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), respectively.
Supply chain responsibility
Our “Seed to Feed” process tracks where our ingredients are planted, where they are raised, and how they are shipped to our manufacturing facilities. Our commitment to transparent operations extends to our suppliers. We have stringent standards for supplier selection and only work with those who share our ideals for product quality while leaving a minimal environmental impact.
Working with our technical, scientific, engineering, and operational experts, we have creatively found ways to improve our sourcing. We look for opportunities to limit our environmental footprint and use technology in our manufacturing that allows for significantly faster production that uses less electricity than the industry standard. In fact, as part of our 50 by 50 campaign, we have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.
The role of packaging
Reduction of packaging and waste benefits our environment, and our business in cost savings and efficiencies gained. By minimising packaging, using recycled material, and eliminating non-recyclable material from our packaging, we will help achieve a waste-free future and help advance the circular economy. We are proud of our early achievements, including eliminating plastic bags in some countries, reducing excess packaging materials.
Smart, streamlined distribution
Currently, we have five manufacturing facilities, along with several trusted contract manufacturers. Combined, these manufacturing centres span four continents and empower us to meet worldwide demand. The move in recent years to vertically integrate our operations not only has ensured better product quality and cost control, but also provides us with increased opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of our manufacturing facilities.
We primarily use ocean transport for global shipping, which has the lowest carbon footprint of any commercial transportation mode. For some routes, we use rail given its cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency. We only use airplanes for transporting product transport in rare instances. As we work to formalise carbon reduction strategies in the future, we will be prioritising the carbon footprint of our logistics operations to gain additional efficiencies where possible.
What the Future Looks Like
Moving forward, we want our sustainability efforts to serve as a model in our industry and one of our key differentiators. We intend to lead not only in our ability to nourish people but the planet as well.
Our journey to support the environment is reflected in our first Global Responsibility Report.