From Product Data to Collective Action:Building Shared Accountability for Healthier Food Environments in Kenya

Introduction: The food environment is shaped by multiple actors, but these actors often lack a shared, transparent evidence base to understand the healthiness of products and identify where action is needed. The objective is to demonstrate how a shared product-level data infrastructure can support collaboration and accountability across government, industry, civil society, and investors. Methodology: To build the shared data infrastructure in an easy-to-use dashboard, we selected 30 companies, encompassing 57% of the national food & beverage (F&B) market share, to capture a meaningful proportion of Kenya's packaged F&B environment. The nutritional quality of products from these 30 companies is analyzed using the nationally developed Kenyan Nutrient Profiling model (KNPM) along with other international models. The research extended to the private-label products offered by the 3 largest retailers in Kenya, selected based on their market share in Kenya’s modern grocery retail landscape, for which the 3 are estimated to cover 36-42% of the share. Results and Discussion: The findings reveal a significant gap between current offerings and national health standards: using the KNPM, only 10% of 840 manufacturers’ products and 13% of 232 retailers’ private-label products pass the targets as defined by the KNPM. The findings were consolidated in a publicly accessible dashboard, providing a shared evidence base for dialogue among civil society organisations (CSOs), investors, and policymakers. Roundtable discussions used this evidence to identify priorities for policy and industry action. Conclusion: The research demonstrates the value of transparent, product category-level data to bring together different actors to identify the gaps in the food environment and define complementary responsibilities for action. The next step is to translate these findings into a practical AI-empowered data hub: one that enables small, medium and larger companies to assess their product policies and portfolios against national nutrient standards, while offering actionable insights to policymakers and investors.