Nestlé likes to describe itself as “the world’s leading nutrition, health and wellness company.” With 339,000 employees, 344 factories across 188 countries, and a portfolio that includes everything from Kit Kats and Nescafé to Purina dog food and San Pellegrino mineral water, the Swiss giant is genuinely impossible to avoid. It is also, by most accounts, one of the most controversial corporations ever to exist — a company that has been caught violating its own codes, breaking international standards, defrauding regulators, bribing hospital staff, enslaving children, stealing water, and marketing its products with what can only be described as calculated dishonesty. Critics have called it “one death ray away from cinematic levels of evil.” That might be hyperbole. The documented facts are disturbing enough on their own.
What follows is not a collection of rumours or activist talking points. It is a record — scandal by scandal, lawsuit by lawsuit — of what Nestlé actually did, what happened as a result, and how, almost without exception, the company walked away with barely a scratch.
1. The Baby Formula Catastrophe: Marketing That Killed Infants
The story begins at Nestlé’s very origins. Henri Nestlé founded the company in 1867 specifically to produce infant formula — dried milk for babies who could not be breastfed. A century later, the company’s aggressive expansion into the developing world with this same product would become one of the most damning corporate episodes of the 20th century.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nestlé was pushing its infant formula across Africa, Asia, and Latin America through a campaign that can only be described as predatory. The company sent saleswomen dressed in white nurse uniforms — “mothercraft nurses,” they were called — into hospitals and homes to encourage new mothers to abandon breastfeeding in favour of formula. These women were not nurses. They were Nestlé sales representatives, sent to cultivate dependency on a product that cost money the families didn’t have, required clean water that wasn’t available, and demanded a level of hygiene education that had never been provided.
The consequences were catastrophic. In countries where clean water was scarce and poverty severe, mothers mixed formula with contaminated water, causing deadly infections and diarrhoea in newborns. Families who couldn’t afford a continuous supply diluted the powder beyond any nutritional use, starving their infants slowly. Doctors began sounding alarms about mass infant deaths in the mid-1970s. In 1974, the British NGO War on Want published a pamphlet titled The Baby Killer, which named Nestlé directly. When a German-language version was published as Nestlé Kills Babies, the company sued for defamation in Switzerland. They won — but only barely, and in the most damaging way possible. The defendants were fined just 300 Swiss francs (roughly $400 in today’s money), and the judge publicly stated that Nestlé “must modify its publicity methods fundamentally.” TIME magazine called it a moral victory for the activists.
A global consumer boycott of Nestlé products launched in 1977 became one of the longest-running corporate boycotts in history. The issue was debated in the U.S. Congress in 1978. Under enormous pressure, the World Health Organization created the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 1981, which banned the distribution of free samples to mothers and prohibited formula marketing in healthcare settings. Nestlé formally agreed to comply.
Then, in 1988, the boycott was reinstated — because there was evidence Nestlé was violating the very WHO Code it had signed. The company was distributing large quantities of free samples to hospitals again. In 2011, nineteen major NGOs including Save the Children, Oxfam, and CARE International launched a fresh boycott in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2017, six Nestlé employees in China were found guilty of bribing hospital staff in order to gain access to new mothers and market formula directly to them. That same year, a whistleblower working as a “Medical Delegate” for Nestlé in Pakistan revealed the same practice: plying nurses with gifts to gain access to maternity wards and directly persuading new mothers to bottle-feed rather than breastfeed.
In 2014, Nestlé spent an estimated $160,000 lobbying against expanded maternity leave provisions in the United States — policies that would have supported breastfeeding. Reports linked the company to organizations actively opposing maternity leave legislation.
The most harrowing accounting of the damage comes from modern epidemiological research. Estimates suggest that Nestlé’s formula marketing campaign in low-income countries could have caused up to 212,000 additional infant deaths per year at its peak — in families without reliable access to clean water. Over the period from 1960 to 2015, researchers have calculated that the aggressive marketing of infant formula may have contributed to approximately 10.5 million excess infant deaths. Nestlé has never accepted these figures.
No executive was ever prosecuted. No criminal charges were ever brought. The company paid no meaningful financial penalty. Nestlé remained — and remains — the global leader in infant formula.
2. Child Slavery in the Cocoa Supply Chain
Nestlé’s chocolate products — Kit Kat, Smarties, After Eight, Aero, among others — are among the best-known confectionery brands in the world. The cocoa that goes into them has, for decades, been harvested in part by children — some of them trafficked, some of them working without pay, many of them wielding machetes and exposed to toxic pesticides on plantations in West Africa.
The scandal broke publicly in the early 2000s when journalists revealed that hundreds of thousands of children — many trafficked from neighbouring countries like Mali and Burkina Faso — were working on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast and Ghana, labouring for up to fourteen hours a day, sleeping in locked barns, and receiving no education and sometimes no wages. In 2001, Nestlé and other major chocolate companies — Mars, Hershey’s, Cadbury among them — signed what became known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a solemn pledge to eliminate “the worst forms of child labour” from their cocoa supply chains by 2005.
The year 2005 came and went. The deadline was pushed to 2008. Then to 2010. Then to a “70% reduction by 2020.” By 2020, a report from the U.S. Department of Labor found that over 1.5 million children were still performing hazardous work in cocoa production in Ivory Coast and Ghana alone — more than 40% of children in those farming communities. The number had not fallen since 2001. It had risen.
In 2005, a group of former child labourers from Mali filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal courts against Nestlé and Cargill, alleging that the corporations had knowingly purchased cocoa from plantations that used trafficked child slaves, and therefore bore legal responsibility for their exploitation. The case, Nestlé USA v. Doe, wound its way through the American court system for sixteen years. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed it on procedural grounds: since the acts of enslavement occurred in Ivory Coast, American laws — specifically the Alien Tort Statute — could not apply. The plaintiffs received nothing.
Nestlé’s legal argument throughout was simple: it did not own the plantations; it merely purchased cocoa from intermediaries who purchased from cooperatives who purchased from smallholders. This is the corporate impunity mechanism at its most elegant. By maintaining a long enough supply chain, the company can profit from cheap cocoa produced with child labour while formally claiming no knowledge of and no responsibility for the conditions of production. The lower cocoa prices that result from this arrangement translate directly into higher margins on every chocolate bar Nestlé sells.
In 2012, the Fair Labor Association — an organisation Nestlé itself had invited in to audit its supply chain — found that the company was violating its own labour code. Nestlé acknowledged the findings. It launched its “Cocoa Plan” programme in 2009, distributed seedlings, and built some schools in cocoa-farming villages. The number of children working on cocoa farms continued to rise.
3. The Water Wars: Stealing from Communities in Crisis
Perhaps no aspect of Nestlé’s conduct has generated more visceral public anger than its water operations. The company bottles and sells water under dozens of brands — Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Perrier, San Pellegrino, Deer Park, Vittel, and Nestlé Pure Life among them. The controversy is not primarily about the plastic bottles, though that is real enough. It is about where the water comes from, what permits were used to extract it, and what the communities left behind were forced to drink.
In California, Nestlé spent years pumping water from the San Bernardino National Forest under a permit that had expired in 1988 — that’s right, for decades the company extracted water from a protected national forest on the basis of a permit issued more than a quarter-century earlier. State regulators repeatedly failed to act, a fact that took on an especially sharp edge when the investigation later revealed that the former forest supervisor who declined to review the expired permit was simultaneously serving as a board member of a nonprofit whose most notable donor was Nestlé’s Arrowhead Water division, which had even received an award named in his honour. The company was eventually forced to renegotiate its permit, but continued pumping during California’s worst droughts in recorded history, at a time when residents were being ordered to cut household water usage.
In Pakistan, Nestlé established two bottling plants above a major underground aquifer, extracting billions of litres annually. Water levels in surrounding communities dropped hundreds of feet. The remaining groundwater became contaminated. An internal audit revealed that Nestlé wasted approximately 43% of all water it extracted — nearly 1.9 billion litres in 2018 alone — despite the company publicly claiming a waste rate of only 15%. Meanwhile, 80% of Pakistan’s population faces severe water scarcity, and only 36% have access to water considered safe. Nestlé’s legal right to extract was technically valid under colonial-era property laws that have never been reformed. The communities had no recourse.
In Michigan, Nestlé pumped water near Flint — a city that was simultaneously in the grips of a public health emergency caused by lead contamination in its municipal water supply — and applied to increase its extraction from 250 to 400 gallons per minute. State regulators initially approved the increase despite over 80,000 public comments opposing it. In Nigeria, communities near Nestlé extraction sites have similarly been left without reliable clean water access.
The company’s former CEO, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, sparked global outrage in 2013 when video footage emerged of him stating that the view that water is a public right is “extreme” and that water should be privatised and given a “market value.” The backlash was significant enough that Nestlé was eventually forced to sell its North American water brands — Poland Spring, Deer Park, Arrowhead and others — to a private equity firm in 2021. The environmental and community problems those brands created did not leave with them.
4. Price-Fixing Cartels
Nestlé has been caught participating in illegal price-fixing schemes on multiple continents.
In Canada, a years-long investigation by the Competition Bureau resulted in raids on chocolate company offices and a finding that former Nestlé Canada CEO Robert Leonidas had personally shared the company’s pricing plans with executives from Hershey, Mars, and Cadbury to illegally coordinate chocolate prices. According to court filings, Leonidas met with rival executives and handed over an envelope containing Nestlé’s pricing plans, reportedly saying: “I want you to hear it from the top — I take my pricing seriously.” In 2013, Nestlé settled a Canadian civil class-action lawsuit for $9 million while denying any wrongdoing.
In Germany, Nestlé participated in a chocolate price-fixing cartel involving five other companies. Raids were conducted and class-action lawsuits followed. Nestlé settled for $9 million in the U.S. as well without admitting liability.
In Spain, the story took a different form. In February 2024, the Spanish Audiencia Nacional — the country’s high court — fined Nestlé €6.86 million for participating in a cartel with other dairy companies to suppress the prices paid to Spanish milk farmers between 2000 and 2013. The cartel had collectively kept farmers’ incomes artificially low for over a decade. Spanish dairy farmers were granted the right to pursue further damages claims.
5. Maggi Noodles: Lead, Lies, and a Half-Billion Dollar Crisis in India
For decades, Maggi noodles were the dominant instant noodle brand in India, holding roughly 70-75% of the market and occupying a place of genuine cultural affection — associated with childhood, comfort, and convenience. Then in 2015, everything fell apart.
Food safety inspectors in Uttar Pradesh collected routine samples of Maggi noodles and sent them for laboratory testing. The results were alarming: lead levels measured at 17.2 parts per million — nearly seven times the permissible limit of 2.5 ppm. Additionally, the product’s packaging prominently claimed “No Added MSG,” yet tests detected monosodium glutamate. The false labelling was a direct regulatory violation.
When the findings became public in May 2015, the situation escalated with extraordinary speed. Within weeks, state governments across India banned Maggi sales: Delhi, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. On June 5, 2015, the national food authority FSSAI issued a sweeping order: all nine approved variants of Maggi noodles were declared “unsafe and hazardous for human consumption.” 400 million packets of noodles were recalled and destroyed. In some Indian cities, protesters burned Maggi packets in the streets and targeted photographs of Bollywood celebrities who had been paid to endorse the product.
Nestlé denied the findings, questioned the reliability of Indian government laboratories, and launched a legal challenge against the ban. International testing in the U.S., UK, Singapore, and Australia found Maggi noodles safe — raising genuine questions about testing methodology. The Bombay High Court eventually cleared Nestlé, finding the government’s evidence insufficient, and the company resumed sales in November 2015.
But the financial damage was devastating: sales fell 90% within a month; total losses exceeded half a billion dollars; Nestlé faced a fine of approximately $77 million from Indian authorities; and the brand spent years rebuilding trust. The episode raised fundamental questions about whether a company that had operated in India for decades had adequate quality controls in place, and whether its “No Added MSG” labelling was deliberately misleading. Nestlé eventually agreed to remove the claim from its packaging.
6. The Chinese Melamine Catastrophe
The 2008 Chinese milk scandal was one of the worst food safety disasters in history. Melamine — an industrial chemical used in plastics — was found to have been deliberately added to milk and infant formula in China to fake higher protein readings during quality testing. Six infants died; over 300,000 were sickened, many requiring hospitalisation for kidney damage.
Nestlé initially denied that any of its Chinese products were contaminated. The Taiwanese government then detected traces of melamine in Nestlé products, flatly contradicting the company’s statements. Nestlé was forced to dispatch specialists from Switzerland to perform chemical testing at five Chinese production facilities. Though Nestlé was not found to be the primary source of the contamination — that responsibility fell principally on Chinese suppliers and dairy companies — the episode exposed serious gaps in the company’s supply chain verification and quality assurance processes in one of its fastest-growing markets.
7. E. Coli and Cookie Dough: The U.S. Contamination Outbreak
In June 2009, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in the United States was traced to Nestlé’s refrigerated cookie dough, originating from a production plant in Danville, Virginia. More than 50 people fell ill across 30 states, roughly half of whom required hospitalisation. E. coli O157:H7 is a strain capable of causing severe kidney failure, particularly in children and the elderly.
Nestlé recalled 30,000 cases of the cookie dough product. Investigators determined the source of contamination to be flour supplied by a raw material provider — raising questions about Nestlé’s supplier vetting and incoming ingredient testing. The company subsequently implemented heat-treatment protocols for flour in its manufacturing process.
8. Buitoni Pizza: Children Dead, Investigation Ongoing
In 2022, Nestlé’s Buitoni brand — a beloved Italian food label producing fresh pasta and pizzas — was linked to an E. coli outbreak in France that killed two children and hospitalised fourteen others. The contaminated product was identified as frozen Fraîch’Up pizzas manufactured at the Caudry plant in northern France.
A judicial investigation was opened in France into potential corporate manslaughter charges. Nestlé recalled the affected products and shuttered the Caudry facility. A separate lawsuit was filed in New York. The investigation was ongoing as of 2024.
9. Sugar in Baby Food: Two-Tiered Nutrition
In April 2024, an investigation by Public Eye, a Swiss NGO, and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) revealed a troubling pattern in Nestlé’s product formulation: baby cereals and infant formulas sold in lower- and middle-income countries — across Africa, Asia, and Latin America — contained significantly higher amounts of added sugar compared to the identical products sold in Europe and other wealthy markets.
The products in question included Nestlé’s Cerelac and Nangrow lines, staple baby foods in many developing countries. European regulations restrict added sugar in such products; many of the countries where the high-sugar versions were sold had no equivalent restrictions, meaning Nestlé was technically compliant — while applying a demonstrably lower nutritional standard to children in poorer countries than to children in wealthy ones. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India launched an investigation following the revelations.
Critics pointed out that high added sugar in infant foods is associated with lifelong elevated risk of obesity, diabetes, and dental disease. Nestlé’s defence was regulatory compliance. The ethical question — whether a company with the resources and knowledge to produce lower-sugar versions should deliberately sell higher-sugar products to populations with less regulatory protection — went unanswered.
10. Forced Labour in Thai Seafood
In November 2015, Nestlé concluded a year-long internal investigation and publicly disclosed that seafood products sourced from Thailand — used in its Purina pet food lines — had been produced using forced labour. Workers, some of them trafficked migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia, had been subjected to debt bondage, physical violence, and conditions amounting to modern slavery on Thai fishing vessels.
To its credit, this is a case where Nestlé proactively disclosed the findings rather than waiting to be caught. The company committed to reforming its Thai supply chain. However, the disclosure confirmed what many had long suspected: forced labour was embedded in multiple arms of Nestlé’s global supply chain, not just in cocoa.
11. Palm Oil and Deforestation
In 2010, Greenpeace launched a campaign targeting Nestlé’s use of palm oil in Kit Kat bars, exposing the company’s reliance on suppliers who were clearing Indonesian rainforest — home to critically endangered orangutans — to establish palm oil plantations, in some cases without legal permits. Greenpeace released a video parodying the Kit Kat “Have a Break” ad campaign, showing an office worker biting into a Kit Kat only to discover an orangutan’s finger inside.
Nestlé’s initial response was to have the video removed from YouTube on copyright grounds — a decision that backfired spectacularly when the Streisand Effect took hold and the video spread exponentially. Eventually Nestlé committed to sourcing only certified sustainable palm oil, cutting ties with suppliers like Sinar Mas that had been specifically linked to illegal deforestation.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, NGOs continued to document Nestlé’s palm oil sourcing as allegedly linked to both deforestation and forced labour on plantations. The company’s 2024 ESG disclosure acknowledges ongoing controversies in this area.
12. Demanding Debt from a Famine-Stricken Nation
In 2002, Nestlé presented a demand to the government of Ethiopia — a country in the grip of a devastating famine affecting millions of people — for repayment of a $6 million debt related to a company that had been nationalised by Ethiopia’s previous Marxist government decades earlier.
The spectacle of a multi-billion dollar corporation pressing its legal claim against a nation where people were starving generated global revulsion. Over 8,500 people emailed Nestlé to protest. The company backed down and eventually agreed to accept $1.5 million, which it committed to reinvesting through charities including the Red Cross, Caritas, and the UNHCR. The episode illuminated the extent to which Nestlé’s legal teams were prepared to operate independently of any sense of proportionality or public responsibility.
13. Lobbying Against Breastfeeding Support
Documents and investigative reports have linked Nestlé to lobbying activities directed against the expansion of maternity leave in the United States. In 2014 alone, the company spent an estimated $160,000 lobbying around the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Reports from organisations including the National Women’s Law Center and investigative journalism in outlets including The Guardian and The Intercept identified Nestlé’s financial connections to groups opposing maternity leave legislation.
The connection between reduced maternity leave, lower breastfeeding rates, and higher formula sales was not lost on observers. A company whose profitability in the infant formula sector depends on women not breastfeeding had financial incentives to oppose policies that would make extended breastfeeding easier. Nestlé denied intentional anti-breastfeeding lobbying.
14. Working With Authoritarian Regimes
Reports have placed Nestlé among companies that maintained or expanded commercial relationships with authoritarian governments, including Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, during periods when such relationships were ethically contested and complicated by human rights concerns. The company’s decisions about where to operate have consistently prioritised market access over political scrutiny.
15. Plastic Pollution
Nestlé was identified as one of the world’s top plastic polluters in annual audits conducted by Break Free From Plastic — appearing in the top three globally for three consecutive years. Despite public commitments to sustainability and recycling targets, The Guardian reported that the company had made “zero progress” on reducing plastic pollution over the measurement period. Nestlé’s reliance on single-use plastic packaging across its product lines — particularly for bottled water before the sale of those brands — generated enormous volumes of unrecyclable waste.
The Pattern: A Company That Learned to Survive Getting Caught
Reading across Nestlé’s history of scandals, a distinct pattern emerges. The company markets aggressively in spaces where regulation is weak or absent. When caught, it questions the evidence. When legal pressure mounts, it settles without admitting liability. When public pressure becomes severe, it makes promises with future deadlines. When those deadlines arrive, it requests extensions. It funds PR campaigns, CSR programmes, and sustainability reports. And then it continues largely as before.
The mechanisms of impunity are multiple. A global supply chain long enough to ensure no direct legal responsibility for conditions at the bottom. Financial resources large enough to litigate indefinitely. A regulatory environment that, across many of the countries where Nestlé operates, lacks the capacity or independence to enforce standards meaningfully. And the sheer ubiquity of Nestlé products — the ordinary, everyday familiarity of Nescafé, Kit Kat, Maggi, Milo — which makes the abstract reality of corporate wrongdoing feel distant and unconnected from daily life.
What makes Nestlé’s record particularly striking is not that a large corporation has committed ethical violations. That, regrettably, is common. What is striking is the breadth of the violations — spanning infant health, child labour, water rights, food safety, price-fixing, forced labour, environmental destruction, and regulatory fraud — and the consistency with which the company has escaped meaningful accountability for all of them. No senior executive has faced criminal prosecution for the infant formula deaths. No one was jailed over the cocoa supply chain. The water is still being extracted. The child labour commitments are still being extended.
Nestlé’s annual reports consistently celebrate its ethical code, its commitment to sustainability, its investment in communities. The documented record tells a different story — of a corporation that has, with remarkable consistency, prioritised profit over people, and has learned that the cost of getting caught is almost always manageable.
Sources: Wikipedia (Controversies of Nestlé; 1977 Nestlé Boycott; Maggi Noodles Safety Concerns in India), U.S. Supreme Court (Nestlé USA v. Doe, 2021), U.S. Department of Labor (2020 Child Labour Report), Public Eye / IBFAN (2024 baby food sugar investigation), Spanish Audiencia Nacional (2024 dairy cartel ruling), FSSAI (2015 Maggi ban order), Fair Labor Association (2012 Nestlé audit), Greenpeace (2010 Kit Kat campaign), Break Free From Plastic annual brand audits, The Guardian, Fortune, Food Safety News.
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