April 19-20, 2008. Nestlé chairman keeps his eye on the future, International Herald Tribune. Peter Brabeck is a 64-year Austrian, a Nestlé veteran who just relinquished his chief executive role after 11 years. The new CEO and President is Paul Bulcke. Author Karina Robinson is senior editor of The Banker. Nestlé Corporate Business Principles make clear that the company wishes to behave responsibly in marketing infant formula; activist NGOs continue to monitor the issue. All About Nestlé ( pdf , 595 kb ).
September 21, 2007. New Nestle CEO will stick to current strategy | Deals, Reuters. Under Brabeck, Nestlé was quick to seize on healthy trends that favoured diet and sport foods, customised hospital nutrition and mineral water. Comment: Coca-Cola and Pepsico are also racing to develop more nutritious offerings. A good switch, whether the result of CSR at work or simply old-fashioned profit maximization.
October 10, 2006. Interviews / Q&A's - The big interview, Ethical Corporation. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Nestlé CEO - Values and the value. Comment: Brabeck is compared with Wal-Mart and other large companies that have changed course to address environmental issues. December 11, 2000.Nestlé: An Elephant Dances, Business Week, International Edition. Under CEO Brabeck, Nestlé already has slashed spending by $1.6 billion. Within a few years, he aims to whack costs by an additional $1.4 billion. The 134-year-old Nestle, for instance, booked $46.6 billion in revenues in 1999. It employs 230,000 people and runs 509 factories in 83 countries, producing an astounding 8,000-plus different products, ranging from Friskies cat food to Perrier bottled water. Comment: Eight years ago, Brabeck was cutting expenses 6 percent because he correctly anticipated a downturn. He was also investing heavily in IT. The number of Nestlé brands has remained the same since 1999, but revenues have more than doubled to $108 billion as of 2007.
4/3/08 A Town Torn Apart by Nestlé: How a deal for a bottled water plant set off neighbor against neighbor in struggling McCloud, Calif., Business Week.  Officials in the old mill town of McCloud, Calif., figured a bottled water plant would bring good times. Instead, the deal they made set off a bitter, neighbor-against-neighbor feud. Tucked into the foothills of Mount Shasta, the Northern California town of McCloud has no stoplights and one grocery store. A former logger's El Dorado, McCloud fell on hard times in the 1980s when it started running out of trees to cut down. But with its drop-dead panoramas and crisp, clean air, the burg started to limp back in the 1990s. Today it is a world-renowned paradise for trout anglers, a respite for burned-out boomers looking to escape the status race, and a hotbed of New Age seekers, some of whom jet in from Japan to meditate and chant in what they regard as a spiritual vortex. It is here that Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA), a subsidiary of the Swiss food and beverage giant, plans to operate one of the largest spring-water bottling plants in the U.S. The 1 million-square-foot facility—picture five Wal-Mart (WMT) supercenters strung together—is to rise on the site of McCloud's defunct lumber mill, a 250-acre swath of land that bends around the base of the mountain. Nestlé aims to draw 1,250 gallons a minute of water from McCloud's glacier-fed springs.
3/17/08 Nestlé Releases Its First "Creating Shared Value" (CSV) Report, (CSRwire) Nestlé has  launched its first Creating Shared Value report, including new figures on the impact of its business activities on the environment and society across the world. In 2007, Nestlé reduced its direct greenhouse gas emissions by 16% compared with ten years ago, and its overall water withdrawal by 28%, while at the same time increasing the total volume of goods produced by 76%. In 2007, Nestlé invested more than CHF 100 million in environment-related industrial improvements, as well as around CHF 170 million in new production facilities in Brazil, Pakistan and China. The company also continued to provide free technical assistance to more than 600,000 farmers in the developing world, including CHF 30 million in micro-credits. The report was reviewed for accuracy by Bureau Veritas. Comment: A few years ago at Davos, the Economist Magazine celebrated Nestlé (which has long been a target of campaigners) as the lone holdout against CSR. The Economist has become more friendly to CSR in 2008 (CSR reporting is now increasingly becoming a matter of law as well as public expectation in Europe) and so apparently has Nestlé. CSR, CSV - a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Contact: Nestlé. More information: CSR Profile for Nestle,
| 4/22/08 Nestlé is an interesting company because the brand was originally associated with one product, chocolate. It now has a world-wide reach in the chocolate industry (and in the coffee industry with the Nescafé brand) and has grown to $108 billion revenues in 2007 and the company owns 8,000 other brands. The company attracted the attention of activists in the 1990s for having promoted infant formula in the 1990s with advertisements in developing countries they said suggested infant formula was preferable to breast milk. NGOs argued that mothers in these countries can’t afford to keep paying for formula and that the lack of modern kitchens makes the use of formula problematic and less desirable than breast milk. In 2006 at Davos, the CEO of Nestlé was cited favorably by the Economist as being the only CEO to question the primacy of CSR as a guide for contemporary company management. Both the Economist and Nestlé in 2008 appear to have given up fighting CSR, which has met the test of the martketplace, and are attempting to work within its parameters. Nestlé has a three-letter word for what it is doing – CSV - “Creating Shared Value” - an approach to Corporate Social Responsibility.
3/26/08 Nestle's Shared Value Creation Report was published in early March at www.nestle.com/csv and also at www.csrwire.com. “For a business to be successful in the long term it has to create value, not only for its shareholders but also for society. We call this Creating Shared Value. It is not philanthropy or an add-on, but a fundamental part of our business strategy. Nestlé has launched the company's first Creating Shared Value report, including new figures on the impact of its business activities on the environment and society across the world. The report, which was reviewed for accuracy by Bureau Veritas, is an integral part of Nestlé's business reporting. It contains a number of detailed figures, which have become available as a result of the continued development of GLOBE. CARE is a key foundation of Nestle's Shared Value Creation Model:
- COMPLIANCE with (1) Laws & (2) Nestlé Corporate Business Principles contribute to
- SUSTAINABILITY and together
- CREATE SHARED VALUE
CARE is a global integrated program to verify, through external independent auditors, that Nestle's operations comply with the social and environmental elements of Nestlé's Corporate Business Principles.
More links for the University of Geneva students (when you get to this point, please send an email to the instructor - john@csrnyc.com. As of Earth Day two students so far have sent emails):
Henri Nestlé, founder
Palais Nestlé, Vevey, Vaud Video News - Nestlé Headquarters (25 July 2007) Palais Nestlé, Vevey Palais Nestlé
April 2007 Letter to Nestle CEO from the Sierra Club on Environmental Issues
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