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Nestlé MP sets up consultancy

The former MP covering Buxton, where Nestlé bottles water, stood down at the May General Election. Mr. Tom Levitt became notorious for defending Nestlé after receiving free tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and Lords cricket matches, and an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa - where he failed to notice Nestlé advertising formula in supermarkets, something that even its competitors labelled as a breach of the marketing requirements. Mr. Levitt refused to meet with Baby Milk Action. 

Private Eye reported in February that Mr. Levitt had lined up a job as a paid advisor to Nestlé, which Mr. Levitt denied. If Mr. Levitt were to go on the Nestlé payroll, he would be following in the footsteps of past Nestlé apologists such as Lord Nazir Ahmed who became a Nestlé consultant two years after conducting an ‘independent’ investigation of Nestlé in Pakistan, which turned out to have been organised and funded by the company (Update 31).

For the time being Mr. Levitt has set himself up as a consultant operating under the name Sector 4 Focus. His pitch: “Building on 13 years of Parliamentary experience, I offer bespoke training on lobbying and befriending local MPs and councillors. My specialist area of interest is in building partnerships between third sector groups and private businesses with a common mission.”

Nestlé sells Alcon, buys pizza

Nestlé completed its sale of its Alcon contact lens business to Novartis in January 2010, fuelling speculation that it would use the US$ 39 billion in its bid to buy Cadbury’s, a UK confectionery company.  In the event, Cadbury’s was bought by Kraft in an £11.7 billion takeover. Kraft partly financed the deal by selling its US frozen pizza business to Nestlé, which used US$3.7 billion of its Alcon cash for the purchase.

Nestlé crashes BlogHer Conference

A conference for thousands of female bloggers took place in New York on 8 August. Blogging is big business in the States, with companies offering gifts for product endorsements by prominent bloggers. Last year Nestlé provoked a PR disaster when it invited parenting bloggers to a five-star Californian hotel, complete with celebrity chef. A storm erupted on the Twitter social networking site as people posted questions to be put to Nestlé executives over business malpractice and concerns were raised over conflicts of interest.

Nestlé’s Twitter PR disaster was one of the issues scheduled for discussion at BlogHer - then it was announced at the last minute that Nestlé had been taken on board as a sponsor with its Stouffer brand. Several prominent Nestlé critics put their tickets to the event in the bin, but others decided to attend to shame Nestlé and call for BlogHer to implement an ethical funding policy.

• According to PR Week in February: “Nestle received a ‘positivity’ score in social media of just 12 out of 100 in an audit by Yomego Social Media Reputation” and was recruiting yet another PR company to try to improve its image. It has also set up digitalthinktank asking members of the public to help. The ad.ly advertising agency also claimed Nestlé is amongst the companies paying celebrities US$10,000 per tweet to say nice things about it. 

• In April best-selling children’s recipe author Annabel Karmel ended her links with Nestlé after learning about Nestlé’s baby food marketing practices. 

• We don’t have money but we have supporters. Why not add our new Nestlé - Good Grief ! logo and jingle to online articles about the boycott?

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FTSE drafts revisions of FTSE4Good breastmilk substitutes criteria

From the documents regarding the Church Investment Group meeting, Baby Milk Action learned that FTSE has revised the criteria for breastmilk substitute manufacturers to enter its FTSE4Good ethical investment list. According to the CIG secretary, “FTSE had recognised the bar had been set too high by excluding all manufacturers.” Companies are not excluded by default, but by failing to meet the requirements of the criteria. Indeed, FTSE4Good admitted one manufacturer in 2007, only for its Gerber baby food business to be bought by Nestlé, which has since launched aggressive marketing campaigns using the brand, in violation of the criteria. 

The revised criteria still require companies to accept the validity of the World Health Assembly marketing requirements and says companies, "must provide to the FTSE Breastmilk Substitutes Committee, on request, copies of all related marketing literature and product labelling.”

This was exactly the request Baby Milk Action asked the Swiss Government to put to Nestlé in pursuit of our complaint of violations of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, but the Government refused (page 16). Baby Milk Action will gladly help in assessing any materials that are made available to the Committee.

Update July 2011: Following the changes to the FTSE4Good breastmilk substitutes criteria, Baby Milk Action is recommending that people who want to hold baby food companies to account DO NOT invest in a FTSE4Good tracker. Click here for full details.

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United Reformed Church backs boycott - despite Nestlé misinformation

Baby Milk Action welcomes the decision of the United Reformed Church Assembly on 4 July 2010 to continue to support the Nestlé boycott until such time that Nestlé makes the required changes to its baby food marketing.  The Assembly referenced the FTSE4Good criteria. The Assembly rejected a proposal to end the church’s long-running support for the boycott.

[Update November 2011: Some months later, in September 2010, FTSE weakened the FTSE4Good criteria with the express purpose of allowing companies to be included in the Index while continuing to violate the marketing requirements, claiming this would promote "engagement". Nestlé was added to the Index in March 2011. Rather than taking the matter back to the Assembly for review, and the URC Mission Committee (which represents Church and Society issues) "issuing an instruction to its Mission Council meeting to terminate the boycott of Nestle products." The Mission Council serves as the executive of the URC between General Assemblies and meets biannually - click here for details].

Nestlé Vice President Niels Christiansen had earlier met with representatives of the URC, the Methodists and other churches at the Churches Investment Group (CIG) and assured them that Nestlé had changed its ways. Mr. Christiansen apparently claimed that the company investigates all reports of violations - but also said the last report from the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) contained only two genuine violations, which speaks volumes about how dismissive Nestlé is of complaints. 

Mr. Christiansen suggested that IBFAN continues to level criticism at Nestlé and other companies for the purpose of fundraising. IBFAN groups would be delighted if there were funds available for monitoring the industry, but the vast majority of people monitoring on the ground are volunteers and IBFAN has to charge for monitoring reports to help cover costs.

One of those present at the CIG meeting raised violations she had seen simply browsing the company’s South African website. Mr. Christiansen said he would look into it. A representative of the Methodist Church said at the meeting that in his view the decision of the Methodist Church Central Finance Board to invest to ‘change things from within’ had been used by the company and misrepresented the Church’s position. In fact, Nestlé has been asked by the Methodist Church several times to stop suggesting the decision to invest was because there were no longer concerns. Mr. Christiansen said, ‘If that had happened, it was regrettable and would be looked into.’ He assured the URC that if it dropped the boycott and invested, Nestlé would not misrepresent the decision. 

Baby Milk Action was not invited to brief the CIG meeting and was only able to meet with URC representatives two weeks before the Assembly when a resolution to drop the boycott had already been put on the agenda. The alternative Resolution actually adopted, continues support for the boycott until Nestlé changes policies and practices in line with the FTSE4Good criteria and will help keep the pressure on Nestlé to change. Mr. Christiansen is apparently retiring from Nestlé at the end of 2010 - but we hope his successor will look into it (see page 18).

Mr. Henry Nastie explains Nestlé strategy

Spoof marketing guru Mr. Henry Nastie (played by Baby Milk Action’s Mike Brady) gave a 2-minute lecture on the steps of Nestlé’s UK HQ at the annual demonstration on 22 May 2010 explaining Nestlé’s latest global marketing strategy.

Although delivered in an awful Swiss accent, everything in the talk was true - though you won’t hear Nestlé executives being so candid. Watch the film on youtube or Baby Milk Action’s website.

The next demonstration will take place on Saturday 21 May 2011 at 11:00 in Croydon (or Nestlé’s new HQ if a rumoured move takes place).

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Nestlé continues to roll out its misleading marketing strategy around the world, claiming its baby milk ‘protects’ babies, knowing that babies fed on formula are more likely to become sick than breastfed babies and, in conditions of poverty, more likely to die. Despite thousands of emails, Nestlé is attempting to justify practices such as those shown below.

In the past Nestlé has referred to breastfeeding as the ‘Gold Standard.’ Its new campaign claims its formula is ‘The new “Gold Standard” in infant nutrition’ (left in Dubai). that ‘protects’ and reduces the ‘ incidence of diarrhea in the crucial first year of life’ on leaflets distributed to health workers in Egypt (below).

Left: Nan 1 (infant formula) and 2 (follow-on milk)  with almost identical packaging and protect plus claim - on sale in Santiago, Chile, November 2010.

The ‘protect’ logo is also used on complementary foods to be cross-promotional and is used in point-of-sale advertising, here in the Philippines in November 2010. While Nestlé refuses to stop these practices, Nestlé’s Global Public Affairs Manager did eventually agree to stop point-of-sale promotions such as that in Malawi (below).