Words by Charles Celeste Hutchins with his authorization
I tried Duck Duck Going (Web search engine) and I mostly found stuff from 1977.
Ok, thanks to the many helpful people who have replied, I have learned a bunch of stuff about Nestle.
Before I get into it, I also have some political ideas about boycotts. The BDS movement is a canonical example of an organised boycott, which has had some success and which is based off the Apartheid boycott which was very successful. Their methods work.
If you go to their web page and scroll down, you’ll fins a heading, “Targeted Boycotts vs. Non-Targeted Boycotts”. Its already very succinct and well-stated, so I won’t summarise it here. Go look for yourself. Guide to BDS Boycott & Pressure Corporate Priority Targeting | BDS Movement
The problem with non-targetted boycotts isn’t just that they’re not very effective, but that they echo the liberal idea of ‘vote with your dollars’. Not-very-effective boycotts can be a way in which we envision a better world, express our identities and small practices that remind us of our larger political goals that we’re actively working on. Or, if they take up loads of energy, they can also end up replacing more meaningful political action. So this is the structure which I want to apply to talking about Nestle.
From you folks here, it seems like there are three major issues with Nestlé including: environmental degradation (bottled water), slave labour (chocolate), and poor quality or dangerous products in the global south (baby food and formula).
I’m going to discuss these each separately.
Water
This one is kind of personal, as it has seriously impacted my home state, where Nestle did a lot of damage to some aquifers and the ecosystems and communities which relied on them.
Since then, Nestlé sold off a lot of their water bottling factories, including the ones harming California - which is not the same as solving the problem. This does illustrate that this is an industry wide problem that should be solved, IMO, by changes in consumer behaviour and changes in law. We should stop buying bottled water. It should be made illegal. Our cities should install working water fountains.
The Baby Food Action Network has more context on the water situation, although it’s somewhat out of date https://www.
COP 30: Climate Crisis intensifies water scarcity – Nestlé’s water scandals – IBFAN
The Council of Canadians is calling for a boycott of all bottled water. https://
The Lakota People’s Law Project, an indigenous group, is calling for a boycott of Nestle and Starbucks over bottled water https://
Protect Water: #NestlePledge and #StarbucksPledge This is a specific, targetted boycott.
For it to be effective, demand needs to be reduced AND the company needs to know why demand has reduced. If you are going to participate, I would argue that you should sign the pledge and/or write to Nestle and Starbucks and tell them you have taken the pledge.
Then also tell your city council representative, your MP and other people who represent you in government. Bottled water is an environmental disaster and we should have the infrastructure in place to eliminate demand.
Modern Slavery / food / Chocolate
The Ethical Consumer, which follows a liberal ‘vote with your dollars’ model, has background on Chocolate. Ethical Chocolate - all you need to know | Ethical Consumer
They report, ‘70% of the world’s cocoa is … grown in West Africa, primarily in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana’ but ‘few farmers can afford chocolate and many have never tasted it, with over half of Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa farmers living below the global poverty line’ due to ‘highly exploitative’, colonialist price structures, which means the states get ‘virtually no’ tax income either. Also, ‘child labour is still a significant issue … .
This often involves what the International Labour Organization (ILO) defines as “the worst forms of child labour,” practices that harm children’s health, safety, or morals.’ It’s also extremely widespread. ‘In 2020, four in ten cocoa-growing households in Côte d’Ivoire were estimated to use child labour, and six in ten in Ghana.’ This means, ‘You’ve almost definitely eaten chocolate made using child labour’. (Other web pages I looked at said or implied that this child labour is also sometimes slave labour.)
This site provides a score of for virtually every chocolate company, which is not the same as a targetted boycott, but it still makes for depressing reading. Near the bottom are Nestle, but also Booja Booja and Green and Black’s.
USians eat more chocolate than anyone else on earth - its in loads of stuff and often barely noticeable in terms of the final product. Tootsie rolls and Oreos both contain chocolate, not that the taste reflects this. Breakfast cereals add it as an afterthought. It’s the flavouring for protein powders. It’s dusted on cappuccinos. Would we miss it if we just left it off the coffee and switched to another flavouring?
Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a coherent targetted boycott on chocolate.
According to the Observer, ‘Mars, Nestlé and Mondelēz, which owns Cadbury, [were rated] as poor and “brands to avoid”, while Ferrero was rated poor.’
Nestle’s chocolate (and Cadbury’s) also contains non-sustainable palm oil and is subject to a separate boycott over that, because ‘that are provably complicit in ecocide and genocide in West Papua’.
I want to stress that vague consumer guides are not enough because effective boycotts are paired with shareholder action and lobbying for legislative change. The UK and/or EU could mandate living wages for cocoa farmers and make it a condition of import.
However, note that the palm oil boycott is a proper boycott.