Nestlé's history is full of successes. However, if we boil it down to just "successes", we won't tell its full story. In this video we will discover one of the sides of the company that almost no one knows about, but those who do are outraged.
As a rule, businesses are created for a purely marketing reason: A problem exists, I can fix it and I can charge for it. But this was not the only thought of a 19th century German pharmacist named Henri Nestlé who, upon observing the many cases of child malnutrition in the province where he lived, in Switzerland, decided to take action. Nestlé emerged from the good will of a citizen willing to solve a problem not only of the market, but of health.
Henri's concern was legitimate because he knew that childhood malnutrition, which is a condition caused by a deficiency of essential nutrients in the body, is a very serious illness, especially in the first six months of life. It can irreversibly harm the child's brain development in the early stages of life. As his father was a doctor and his wife was very sensitive to the subject, they were concerned about cases of hunger and poor nutrition in children, as their consequences are serious, and even lead babies to death.
EARLY WEANNING, lack of food hygiene and the recurrence of intestinal infections caused by poor sanitation are factors that further accentuate child malnutrition. Scenarios like this, with regard to sanitation and hygiene, were much more common 50 years ago than they are today, especially in certain regions of the world, as we will see. But going back to 19th century Switzerland, health professionals began to notice that many more children were unable to drink breast milk than expected.
And mother's milk is essential for the baby's health. But instead of very isolated cases, 10 out of every 100 children born were, for some reason, unable to breastfeed. Sometimes because the mother is unable to produce milk, sometimes because the baby is unable to suckle from her breast, more common in the case of more extreme newborns.
Therefore, Henri Nestlé, with his experience in the pharmaceutical sector, created a formula that combined powdered cow's milk, wheat flour, sugar and some vitamins, and created the first artificial milk for babies. But Henri was not alone in this endeavor. Jean Balthasar Schnetzler, a scientist in human nutrition, helped him remove the acid and starch from wheat flour, as it is much more difficult for babies to digest these substances .
The product could be prepared by simply adding water, and thus the first infant milk formula was created, Milky Flour, which we can still buy today in any market. Change of tone, to a more emphatic tone, so that the audience remembers this line. Created to help with the nutrition of children, this was Nestlé's first product.
It was with him that Henri founded his company. It didn't take long for Nestlé Dairy Flour to be sold throughout Europe. By this time, the success of Henri's infant formula had already led to the creation of the brand's first factory in 1866.
With the profits, the founder valued good hygiene in the plant's facilities to ensure that children received a quality product. and that it would not harm your health in any way. Change to that tone of someone who is going to tell a secret, which you do.
Here comes a curiosity: the word Nestlé means 'nest or nest' in several languages, such as German and French. Hence the iconic logo of a nest with birds. Henri Nestlé saw himself as if he were, in some way, nuzzling, comforting the children.
Taking care of them with your products. Little did he know what his own company would do years later. Return to normal tone He died in 1890, after having sold Nestlé to his partners.
But before parting ways with the company, Henri Nestlé had created Moça Condensed Milk, which had even been essential in the development of milk chocolate. And Leite Moça was also responsible for Nestlé's first major dispute, as it began to compete with the Anglo-Swiss Milk Company, a giant at the time. But the competition did not last long, as the two companies merged in 1905.
The inter-war period marked a continuous rise for the company which, despite diversifying its portfolio, still focused on children's food products, such as Pelargon and the fateful Lactogen , which I'm still going to talk a lot about. After the Second World War, the whole world, including the company, experienced incredible prosperity and Nestlé's most varied food products became increasingly popular with the public. After all, it was tasty and practical.
There's nothing better. In the 1970s, a report from a charity NGO in England called War on WANT was published under the name 'The Baby Killer', which loosely translates as “ baby exterminator”. It was a document that exposed the mistakes made by the most beloved food industry in the world in its “promotion” of infant breastfeeding in third world countries.
At the same time, a documentary entitled Bottled Babies was released , which contained similar content to the report. The documentary and the report had one thing in common: very serious accusations against Nestlé, which revealed to the world a disturbing truth that would forever tarnish the legacy of a company that forgot why it was founded. The War on Want report dealt with the incidence of a disease that was already known by doctors in various parts of Africa as “Lactogen Syndrome”.
Change the tone to that of the secret And, just to remind you: Lactogen is Nestlé's infant formula. Return to normal tone Nestlé did everything to ensure the documentary didn't spread, which was simple in a time without the internet. And he disregarded the report until the moment it was translated into German with the title “Nestlé exterminates babies”, in Germanic language, by the Swiss NGO Arbeitsgruppe.
After that, German activists who read the report placed screens on the door of the factory that produced artificial milk destined for Africa. And the factory stopped. It was only after that that the conglomerate decided to sue the NGO War on Want.
During the process, the NGO's defense managed to present a wealth of evidence, which scrutinized Nestlé's repulsive marketing in promoting Lactogen. Dirty marketing that moved mountains of money and, worst of all, moved mothers. The formula had already won the American market, with massive advertising.
So much so that it is estimated that 75% of American babies consumed it as a dietary supplement in the 1970s, and in this segment Nestlé was the leader with the Lactogen brand. The problem, in the company's eyes, is that at most a third of these women needed to supplement their diet or replace breastfeeding with artificial milk. But they wanted a lot more public, a lot more money… Change of tone to one of personal conversation.
You know that term "savage capitalism”? That's the type of company it applies to. Returns to normal tone So Nestlé went to Africa, where the level of formal education is lower and, consequently, Africans' access to information, and went on to say that her artificial milk formula was recommended for EVERYONE.
But why would a mother who breastfeeds without problems spend money buying relatively expensive, incomplete milk that requires preparation care? All she has to do is offer the breast and her child will be very well nourished. It was in this sense that the Swiss company invested heavily in marketing, running radio campaigns and spreading posters across cities in order to convince the public that its formula is BETTER THAN BREAST MILK.
However, this marketing devoid of any trace of morality, it was not limited to common advertising campaigns. It went further, practicing a systematic and corrupt lie. Nestlé began to bribe doctors so that they would recommend, WITHOUT NECESSITY, its artificial milk formula for children, intoning advertisements that claimed superiority of Lactogen.
Now it was no longer an advertisement that said this, but his own doctor. Why not trust? Another part of this harmful marketing consisted of hiring so-called “milk nurses”.
They were nurses from the public health network to whom Nestlé offered a high salary. so that they would be sales promoters of the brand, making the same claims as doctors: use Lactogen, it is the best for your child. But don't think that the company's dirty tactics are all about that.
She also offered mothers, when leaving the maternity wards, cans of the brand's powdered milk that would last exactly as long as it took for breast milk to stop being produced. So, when the baby had already lost the practice of sucking from the mother's breast, and the mother was no longer producing milk, there was only one option left: continue buying infant formula. Thousands of mothers from a continent devastated by poverty, corruption and neglect had the belief, based on a corporate lie, that an artificial formula produced in the 'First World' was a symbol of health and even prosperity.
But it was precisely the company from 'a first world country' that ruined them by blatantly lying. Pause Filmmaker Peter Krieg, producer of the documentary Bottle Babies, stated that the company purchased, via electoral donation, the right to advertise in Kenyan hospitals. So the local Ministry of Health, bribed, banned the statement in these environments that “breast milk is the best for the baby”.
African women were able to buy a maximum of 3 cans of the formula per month, corresponding to half of their family income. Committing such a large portion of already tight money shows how these mothers genuinely believed they were doing the best for their children. Again, social conditions helped make the problem worse: these women had no idea what it was like to STERILIZE a bottle.
Most didn't even know how to read, and many of the cans came with instructions in French or German. Other women did not have clean water to sterilize the bottle several times a week, as recommended. The water they drank was muddy water.
It was that water that they heated to use, and with much smaller amounts of milk than was necessary to nourish their babies, because those three cans had to last an entire month. Nestlé knew that it was forcing the consumption of its milk formula in places without the minimum of basic sanitation, with water unsafe for consumption, and it didn't care. The hot climate was also an important factor, since the bottle was usually prepared in the morning, and needed to last for a whole day outside the refrigerator.
If you know a little about biology, you understand that this was like welcoming the formation of a culture of bacteria, which found little resistance when entering the immune system of a malnourished child. Malnourished, the children were affected by dehydration, diarrhea, vomiting, skin rashes and ear and throat infections. Still in Kenya, the focus of the documentary Bottle Babies, around 30 BABIES with dehydration and diarrhea arrived EVERY DAY at the Nairobi hospital.
The alarming thing was: for every 10 babies, ONLY 1 WAS FED BY BREAST MILK. When these children arrived, the doctors already knew: it was Lactogen Syndrome. Without antibodies, babies fed artificial formula are twice as likely to get sick as a newborn breastfed by their mother.
There is documentation that in Zambia, some mothers placed cans of Lactogen on top of their children's graves. They believed, until the last moment, that those were the most valuable things their children had. That this was a sample of their efforts in the fight to make them healthier.
Nestlé's marketing had gone too far, and for those mothers and children, there was no turning back. Their lives had already been destroyed. And what were the consequences of this scandal?
As I mentioned, Nestlé sued the Swiss NGO that produced the War on Want document. The NGO's defense presented a plethora of evidence for everything in its report. His lawyer even compared the company's donations when leaving maternity wards to the practice of heroin traffickers.
They give the new client the first injection of the hallucinogen because they know that from then on the dependence will have already been created and the user will return. Likewise, the effect of bottle feeding was irreversible: countless babies lost their lives with a combination of diarrhea, marasmus, gastroenteritis and stomatitis, Lactogen Syndrome , according to the testimony of several pediatricians in Sierra Leone. But if you found the accusation shocking, Nestlé's defense managed to exceed all limits.
A Swiss doctor, testifying on behalf of the company, claimed that the blame for the deaths of those children lay, in his words, with "governments of freed, illiterate black people, who make rubbish with Nestlé's milk without first providing clean drinking water. " He added saying that “the stupidity of mothers took the lives of their children. " In the end, NESTLÉ WON THE PROCESS, and War on Want even had to pay the company a fine.
The United States Senate even summoned executives from Nestlé who admitted knowing everything that was happening, but stated that the company had no responsibility for it. A worldwide boycott campaign took place against the company at that time, and is still practiced to a lesser extent today. The episode that scared the world led the World Health Organization to ban any type of advertising that claims that artificial milk is better than breast milk.
In addition to banning the distribution of free samples of infant formula. All mothers in the world want the best for their children. Even though they make mistakes, they make mistakes believing they are doing the right thing.
None of these women would do this if they had not received excessive and hideous exposure to artificial milk formula advertising decades ago. Today, more than 50 years after this scandal, Nestlé is the LARGEST BEVERAGE AND FOOD COMPANY in the WHOLE WORLD. The profit so fiercely sought was obtained.
But what would Henri think of what the company that bears his name did? —----- And it's sad to see what poverty and lack of information can do to people. This, unfortunately, is the reality of many Brazilians.
With the motivation to change this, I have this channel. I can do all of this, with a purpose behind it. If you are interested in knowing how anyone can also have a business like this, without any investment or initial skills, there is a free video below, where I explain in detail how it works.
Or, just point the camera on your cell phone at this QR code here on the screen. And do you want to know which mysterious company is DOMINATING Brazil? So click on the video that now appears on your screen and I'll tell you.
And that's it for this video, a big hug and good business.
