Chapter 1: What is the Nestlé 'Baby Killer' scandal about?
Hello. Hello. And welcome to Shorthand, where we're gonna depress you.
I know, it is depressing. This is very depressing. But keep listening, please.
Yeah, and I have to say that this has re-inspired my boycott. I boycotted Nestle for years. I mean, honestly, I think... And then I accidentally drank a Nesquik, and I was like, I hate myself.
I know, and it's not even that tasty. That's the real shame.
Yeah.
But it is sad because it's one of those stories that starts off with good intentions and then is just exploited to fuck.
In 2013, Forbes ranked Nestle, the biggest food and beverage company in the world, as one of the 10 most reputable companies on the planet. And if you have a look at their website, you can maybe see why. Nestle proudly boasts about their mission to halve their carbon emissions by 2030 and how they're committed to a 100% anti-deforestation supply chain, which is quite literally impossible.
So much greenwashing. So much greenwashing. I know people that work in PR and they're like, literally every single company that comes to us is like, can you just greenwash? Just greenwash. Fuck off. Yep. Can we be carbon neutral?
And they're like, you can, doesn't mean anything. Anyway, what Nestlé's website doesn't mention is that Nestlé have been accused of child slave labour, claiming clean water isn't a human right and mass exploitation of the poor.
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Chapter 2: How did Henri Nestlé's early life influence the company?
All of the questionable sales and marketing practices Nestlé carried out were finally exposed.
The company would dress up their attractive saleswomen in nurses' outfits and send them out to hospitals and pharmacies. They'd even sneakily copy the names and addresses of new mothers who had just given birth from hospital records and visit them at home. When they weren't doing this, they'd go as far as wandering residential streets and spotting which homes had baby clothes drying out front.
What sort of commission have they got these people on that they're doing this shit? Because these saleswomen would then sit and convince these mothers using the company's brochure that Nestle's baby formula was better for their baby than their own breast milk was. And that not using it could have fatal consequences. When of course the opposite was true.
They would then hand out just enough free samples of their baby formula that by the time these women ran out, they would have stopped lactating due to not breastfeeding.
Something which is not easy to reverse. So then, once the mothers had stopped lactating, their infants were now completely dependent on the baby formula. And because baby formula was quite expensive after you'd run out of your free trial, these mothers would then have to try and make it last as long as possible by diluting it as much as they could.
And once they ran out of baby formula, they often couldn't afford to buy any more, and by that point also unable to produce their own breast milk. So that meant mothers had no choice but to resort to feeding their own children cornstarch or whole milk.
What's more, many of these mothers lived in impoverished conditions without access to clean drinking water, sterilised equipment or refrigeration, all of which are required to safely use baby formula. Also, the packaging and instructions for Nestle's baby formula were never in the local language. They were either in English or they were in French.
And as a result of this, in the late 1960s, medical authorities began reporting a huge rise in malnourished infants, correlating to the rise in the use of baby formula.
The Baby Killer pamphlet was then translated into German by Bern-based Third World Action Group, AGWD. this time with the title Nestle Kills Babies. And it was also published in Switzerland. Nestle responded by suing the organisation. But this move completely backfired.
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