Unilever commits to food growth after strong 2025 performance

Summary: Unilever 2025 full year performance explained

• Unilever highlights foods strength within its 2025 full year results
• Foods deliver €12.9bn turnover showing resilience across key global regions
• Category posts record 22.6 percent margin reinforcing strategic profitability focus
• Europe performs modestly while Hellmann’s and Knorr support broader portfolio momentum
• Emerging markets drive 3.5 percent growth underpinning long‑term expansion strategy

For some time, Unilever has been seen by many to be de-centring food. It has sold many food businesses, including Graze, Unox, Zwan, and plant-based brand The Vegetarian Butcher.

Most importantly, it has spun off its ice-cream business, a demerger completed late last year. This business was so large that it was instantaneously the world’s biggest ice-cream company upon creation.

Meanwhile, the messaging of the company has not been centred around food. CEO Fernando Fernandez is instead focusing his attention on “more beauty, more wellbeing, more personal care”, a mantra he has repeated more than once.

Nevertheless, Unilever’s full year results for 2025, released today, indicate that food not only has a future at Unilever, but it is an asset for the FMCG multinational.

Food as a growth driver

Despite making up significantly less of Unilever’s portfolio than they once did, foods are still performing well for the UK-based multinational.

Seeing a turnover of €12.9bn for the year, foods were strong in Asia Pacific and Africa, and saw particular ‘momentum’ in Latin America.

However, they have been ‘soft’ in Europe, where they make up 40% of the continent’s business. While performing well in Italy and France and solidly in the UK, food in the Netherlands and Germany leaves much to be desired.

Foods overall saw an overall decline in Europe, although according to Unilever, “outperformed a soft market” in the continent.

Part of the growth was driven by Hellmann’s, which saw strong performance particularly in the flavoured category. Knorr also saw low single-digit growth.

Most significantly, though, foods saw an underlying operating margin of 22.6%, more than any other sector except personal care, which it equalled.

This was also the highest margin that food has ever achieved at Unilever.

While it did see slightly lower underlying sales growth than other areas of the business (at a mere 2.5%), this still suggests that food has potential in Unilever.

“We see foods as a growth business for us“, said Unilever’s CFO Srinivas Phatak. Unilever is determined to invest and grow the business.

Food has benefitted, he suggests, from the business removing parts of the portfolio that are not ‘value-accretive‘.

In short, Unilever feels that it is vindicated in its strategy with regards to food.

Growth in Europe low as emerging markets predominate

Unilever’s performance in Europe has been dwarfed by other geographies. Particularly, it has been offset by substantial success in emerging markets.

Europe saw fairly modest growth from the multinational, with an underlying sales growth of a mere 1.5% (compared to 4.6% in Asia Pacific and Africa, and 5.3% in North America).

Even this modest growth was driven by personal care and home care, with food, as seen above, declining.

Emerging markets, meanwhile, are going from strength to strength, according to CEO Fernandez, seeing 3.5% underlying sales growth for the year, matching the figure for the company overall.

Emerging markets are a “significant long-term competitive advantage” for Unilever, says Fernandez, as they give the company exposure to better population growth rate and broader margin expansion.

Unilever has diversified in emerging markets in terms of geographies, category, segment and price point.

Emerging markets now represent more than half (59%) of Unilever’s turnover.