Nestlé

• 1. Introduction

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  Nestlé S.A. runs 335 factories, operates in 185 countries, and employs around 271,000 people from a base in the small lakeside town of Vevey, Switzerland. Twenty-nine of its brands each sell more than a billion Swiss francs a year, names like Nespresso, Nescafé, Kit Kat, Smarties, and Maggi. Since 2014 it has been the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue. Yet its story began with a problem of spoilage. In the 1860s, one Swiss chemist was trying to keep milk-based baby food from going bad, while across the country an American consul was canning condensed milk. How did two rival milk businesses become a conglomerate spanning coffee, pet care, bottled water, and skin health? And why has a company built on feeding infants spent half a century fighting accusations about how it sells to mothers?

• 2. Two Rivals In Milk

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  In 1866, Charles Page, the US consul to Switzerland, and his brother George Ham Page, both from Lee County, Illinois, founded the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in Cham, Switzerland. By 1873 they had opened their first British operation at Chippenham in Wiltshire. A year before that British expansion, a separate venture was already underway. In 1867, Henri Nestlé developed a milk-based baby food and began marketing it from Vevey. The two enterprises grew across Europe and the United States as direct competitors. Their rivalry sharpened in 1877 when Anglo-Swiss added milk-based baby foods to its line. The following year, the Nestlé Company answered by adding condensed milk, planting each firm squarely in the other's market. Henri Nestlé himself retired in 1875, and the new owners kept his name as the Société Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé. The merger that ended the rivalry came in 1905, when Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss joined to form the Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company.

• 3. Chocolate And Coffee

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  In 1867, the same year Henri Nestlé started his baby food, Daniel Peter began seven years of work to perfect the milk chocolate manufacturing process. Peter needed to remove all the water from the milk added to his chocolate to stop the product developing mildew, and Nestlé had the solution. The two formally merged in 1879. Henri Nestlé and his successors then helped build the Swiss chocolate industry alongside the Peter, Kohler, and Cailler families. In 1904 Daniel Peter and Charles-Amédée Kohler founded a joint chocolate venture, which merged with Cailler in 1911. The combined Peter, Cailler, Kohler, Chocolats Suisses finally merged into the Nestlé group in 1929. Coffee proved just as defining. The Second World War helped introduce Nescafé, whose name means Nestlé's Coffee, and it became a staple drink of the US military. In the 1920s, chocolate had already become the company's second most important activity, and the next decade brought white chocolate to market as the Milkybar.

• 4. Wars And Whiplash

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  The First World War created heavy demand for dairy products through government contracts, and by the war's end Nestlé's production had more than doubled. In January 1919, the company bought two condensed milk plants in Oregon from Geibisch and Joplin for $250,000, one in Bandon and one in Milwaukie. The Bandon plant alone was expanded to process 250,000 pounds of condensed milk daily. When the war ended, those government contracts dried up and consumers switched back to fresh milk. Management responded by streamlining operations and reducing debt. The Second World War hit immediately. Profits dropped from US$20 million in 1938 to US$6 million in 1939. The company set up factories in developing countries, especially in South America. Nestlé supplied both sides of the conflict, holding a contract to feed the German army even as Nescafé fed Allied troops. Louis Dapples served as CEO until 1937, when Édouard Muller succeeded him until his death in 1948.

• 5. The Acquisition Machine

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  In 1947, Nestlé merged with Maggi, a maker of seasonings and soups, and took the name Nestlé Alimentana SA. A string of purchases followed: Crosse & Blackwell in 1960, Findus in 1963, Libby's in 1971, and Stouffer's in 1973. Under chairman and CEO Pierre Liotard-Vogt, the company took a shareholding in L'Oreal in 1974 and bought Alcon Laboratories for $280 million in 1977, the year it adopted its current name. The 1980s brought larger deals. Carnation was acquired for US$3 billion in 1984, bringing Coffee-Mate and Friskies, and Rowntree Mackintosh followed in 1988 for $4.5 billion, delivering Kit Kat, Rolo, Smarties, and Aero. The spending continued into the 2000s with Ralston Purina in 2002, Dreyer's, and Chef America, the creator of Hot Pockets. In January 2006 Nestlé took full ownership of Dreyer's to become the world's largest ice cream maker, with a 17.5% market share. In April 2007, returning to its roots, it bought the US baby-food maker Gerber.

• 6. From Candy To Wellness

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  Since 2010, Nestlé has worked to reshape itself into a nutrition, health and wellness company, fighting declining confectionery sales and the threat of tighter government regulation of such foods. In December 2014 it announced 10 skin care research centres worldwide and spent about $350 million on dermatology research that year. The first SHIELD centre opened in New York in 2015. The pivot drew an activist challenge. In June 2017 the company announced a $20.8 billion share buyback after Third Point Management founder Daniel S. Loeb, holder of a $3.5 billion stake, pressed it to focus on coffee, pet care, and consumer health-care. By July 2018 Loeb argued the shifts were too small and too slow, while Nestlé pointed to its global coffee partnership with Starbucks. That partnership grew into a $7.15 billion distribution deal in May 2018. The portfolio kept shifting: the US confectionery business, including Butterfinger and Raisinets, was sold to the Ferrara Candy Company in January 2018 for an estimated $2.8 billion.

• 7. Boycotts And Backlash

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  Concern about Nestlé's aggressive marketing of breast milk substitutes in less economically developed countries first arose in the 1970s, where clean water can be scarce. Critics accused the company of discouraging mothers from breastfeeding and implying its baby formula was healthier, which led to the 1977 Nestlé boycott in the United States and Europe. Cocoa carried its own toll. Multiple reports have documented widespread child labour, slavery, and child trafficking by cocoa suppliers across West African plantations on which Nestlé relies. In January 2022, the company said it would pay African cocoa farmers cash if they sent their children to school. Water has been a recurring flashpoint. At the second World Water Forum in 2000, Nestlé and other corporations persuaded the World Water Council to recast access to drinking water from a right to a need. A 2024 study in Science Advances found Nestlé responsible for 3% of global branded plastic pollution by count, the 3rd highest share worldwide. Food safety scandals struck too. In late September 2008 melamine was found in a Chinese-made Nestlé milk product, six infants died, and 860 babies were hospitalised.

• 8. Power And Turmoil

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  In 2025, Nestlé recorded consolidated sales of CHF 89.49 billion and net profit of CHF 9.03 billion, with a market capitalisation of roughly 203 billion Swiss francs as of December 2025. Its largest sales category is powdered and liquid beverages at 28.1%, followed by pet care at 20.6%. The leadership has churned. In September 2025, Nestlé dismissed chief executive Laurent Freixe immediately after a board investigation found an undisclosed romantic relationship with an employee, and he left without remuneration. Philipp Navratil, who joined the company in 2001, was appointed in his place. That same month chairman Bulcke departed six months early as part of an accelerated transition. In October 2025, Nestlé announced it would cut 16,000 jobs and weigh selling some of its more than 2,000 brands. The disruption continued into the new year. In January 2026, the company recalled infant formula sold in Europe, Turkey, and Argentina over potential cereulide toxin contamination. Austria's health ministry called it the largest recall in Nestlé's history, and by the 9th of January it had expanded to 49 countries.