The world’s largest food manufacturer, the Swiss multinational corporation Nestlé, has admitted that 60% of its products do not meet generally accepted norms of healthy nutrition, the Financial Times reports, citing a company presentation that was circulated to its top managers. Moreover, several of its product lines will never become healthy, no matter how many of them are updated by the company.
It says that only 37% of the company’s food and beverage products, excluding pet foods and medicated baby foods, scored 3.5 out of 5 on the Australian Healthy Nutrition Index. Within the overall portfolio of food and beverages, about 70% failed to reach this threshold, the presentation said. 96% of drinks, with the exception of coffee, as well as 99% of confectionery and Nestlé ice cream, also did not pass the 3.5 point threshold.
Water and dairy products became the healthiest lines – 82% of water and 60% of dairy products passed the 3.5 point threshold. “We have made significant improvements in our products, [но] our portfolio still falls short of external definitions of health in an environment where regulatory pressures and consumer demand are skyrocketing, ”the presentation said.
Several harmful products were also presented in the presentation – this is Digorno pizza with meat on puff pastry: it contains 40% of the daily sodium requirement, and Hot Pockets pizza with pepperoni – 48 of the daily sodium requirement.
Nestle manufactures instant coffee, mineral water, chocolate, ice cream, broths, dairy products, baby food, pet food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. The main brands are KitKat, Maggi, Nescafe, Nesquik, Nestea.
In February of this year, the American human rights group International Rights Advocates (IRA) filed a federal class action lawsuit in the United States against Nestle, Mars and Cargill over allegations of child labor and complicity in human trafficking. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of eight Mali citizens who said they were sold into slavery as children and were forced to harvest cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire. A spokesman for Nestlé said at the time that the company had “a clear policy against child labor and is working to address this problem.” Nestlé also said the lawsuit “does not contribute to the overall goal of eliminating child labor in cocoa production.”
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