By Kieran Kearey 03/11/25 2 min read
Welcome to business breakdown episode five. This series is a longer version of my Instagram series “Business Breakdown In 60 Seconds”, where I provide information about a business, such as who their current CEO is, who founded the company, controversial news or general facts about the business, etc. But here on the blog, I will dive just a little bit deeper into each business.
As the title says, episode five is about Nestlé.
*This information is purely an objective view based on information taken from internet research*
Table Of Contents –
*Click on each heading to go to that section*
What is Nestlé?
Nestlé is a Swiss food and drink company. Nestlé sells the following products and owns the following brands: Coffee, tea, water, cereal, snacks, pet food, dairy products, Nespresso, Nescafé, Kit Kat, Smarties, Nesquik, etc (Source 1). Nestlé was founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé (The timeline of Nestlé’s company history)
Current CEO
Nestlé’s current CEO is Philipp Navratil, who succeeded Nestlé’s former CEO at the start of September. According to the BBC, the former CEO, Laurent Freixe, had been fired by Nestlé’s on September 1st of this year due to having failed to disclose a romantic relationship with a direct subordinate, which supposedly represented a “conflict of interest” because the subordinate was not on the executive board.
Nestlé boycotts and scandals
It seems there has been several Nestlé boycotts over the years. Starting with a baby milk boycott which has been spoken about on an EthicalConsumer article, says that Nestlé supposedly discouraged breastfeeding by promoting their breast milk substitutes, which lead to a boycott from several countries.
Next, (again covered by EthicalConsumer) a bottled water boycott which was about how Nestlé sourced its water for their bottled water products. Essentially, there had been numerous reports of water bodies drying up because Nestlé had taken too much water from each source – this has countless negative effects on the environment.
In addition to the over-extraction of water, Nestlé has been accused of following an illegal practice of filtration of their water. Specifically, according to greenMe, Nestlé had labelled several bottled water products from their various brands as natural mineral water, when they had put the water through “unauthorized filtration processes”.
Child Labour
According to an article from The Guardian, in 2014 and 2015, researchers had visited hundreds of farms used by Nestlé and found that just under 60 workers were less than 18 years old and 27 out of that amount were less than 15 years old. Furthermore, in 2013, researchers from the Fair Labor Association found child workers at 7% of Nestlé farms visited.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9#Overview
https://www.nestle.com/about/history/nestle-company-history
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1mpm9ee9p9o
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/continuing-controversies-nestle
https://www.greenmemag.com/environment/nestles-water-scandal-executives-under-legal-fire/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/sep/02/child-labour-on-nestle-farms-chocolate-giants-problems-continue
Insight Junction 
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