Living well starts with eating well

Our Farming for the Future initiative is about saving water, improving soil quality and working with nature to improve soil and plant health, preserve natural resources, and promote biodiversity. Our farmers regularly monitor soils and crops to ensure that water, fertilisers, and pesticides are only used when necessary.

When shopping, remember that eating a variety of fruit and vegetables every day helps you and your family get the vitamins, minerals, and fibre that your body needs to function as it should.

Our free range animals are raised without routine antibiotics and are never given hormones or anything to artificially enhance growth.

All our fish is responsibly caught or farmed. As part of our Fishing for the Future initiative, we’re working with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), WWF-SASSI (Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative) and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) to ensure that all the fish and seafood at Woolworths is responsibly sourced. This includes our canned tuna, which is now MSC certified.

Whole grains contain a variety of nutrients, minerals and fibre. Grains that have been refined, such as white flour and white rice, have fewer of these important micronutrients and less fibre. Beans, peas, and legumes such as lentils, are important sources of dietary fibre, which makes you feel fuller and helps maintain gut health.

Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats like avocado, nuts and seeds in your diet helps your body maintain normal cholesterol levels. Our raw and dry roasted nuts are not fried in any oil, so they’re also a better option. Oily fish like salmon and mackerel naturally contain omega 3 fatty acids which contribute to the normal function of the heart.

We not only offer you oils, like olive, avocado, and canola, that are high in unsaturated fat, we also offer you a wide range of everyday ingredients containing less saturated fat, like our skinless chicken breasts, extra-lean mince and lower fat cheeses, so you naturally end up with less saturated fat in your food.

These days it seems everyone is talking about sugar. You’ll be happy to hear that in 2016 we removed 29.3 million teaspoons of sugar from our foods – particularly our bakery, yoghurt and cereal ranges -- and we’re still removing more. We also removed another 1.9 tons of salt from our food in 2016, and are constantly looking at how we can reduce the salt content in more of our foods.

We’ve always tried to minimise the additives in our foods, and took a stand years ago not to add the flavour enhancer MSG to our food. We also stopped using tartrazine and azo-dyes, which are used to add bright colours to things like sweets, snacks and cool drinks. The bottom line: you won’t find any Woolies food that contains MSG, tartrazine or azo-dyes.

We never, ever use these sweeteners in our food, and we never will.

We can’t think of a more pleasant way to reduce stress and bring your family together than by sharing a delicious home-cooked meal. In fact, it’s been shown that sitting down at the dinner table (without cellphones or other distractions) makes for less stressful eating and inspires healthy eating habits.