Creating Shared Value (CSV) is at the heart of Nestlé’s approach to achieving their purpose of unlocking the power of food to enhance quality of life for everyone, today and for generations to come.

In September 2021, the company announced their intention to advance regenerative food systems at scale. This means supporting the development of food systems that protect, renew, and restore the environment, improve the livelihoods of farmers, and enhance the resilience and well-being of farming communities.

Nestlé’s Research and Development (R&D) organization has over 4100 R&D experts across 23 facilities worldwide, and they invest CHF 1.7 billion every year towards advancing regenerative food systems.

Nestlé is committed to reach net zero by 2050 at the latest, even as the business continues to grow. By 2025, they will reduce absolute emissions by 20% from 2018 levels, and by 2030, they will reduce absolute emissions by 50% from 2018 levels.

95% of Nestlé’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions came from activities in their supply chain (such as farming and shipping) and just 5% from their own operations.

Dairy and livestock ingredients are the largest single source of emissions – accounting for approximately half the emissions associated with producing their ingredients.

The company identified that to make progress toward their net zero ambition, they must focus primarily on their upstream supply chain. This led to the development of two main strategic approaches for tackling our Scope 3 emissions: Forest Positive and Regenerative Agriculture.

Forest Positive builds on Nestlé’s decade-long work to end deforestation in their supply chains and is made up of three parts: achieving and maintaining 100% deforestation-free supply chains, long-term forest conservation and restoration, and supporting sustainable landscapes.

Nestlé’s Regenerative Agriculture program centers around four key elements: increasing biodiversity, protecting soil health, reducing chemical farm inputs in water, and integrating livestock where possible.

Brands such as Garden Gourmet, their plant-based food range, and the Nestlé Health Science brands Persona and Garden of Life are leading the way in building agricultural supply chains based on regenerative practices.

Nestlé is piloting net zero dairy farms to assess the potential for farms to be managed in a regenerative way that is not only carbon neutral, but carbon negative.

As a result of GHG reduction projects being scaled up in their operations and supply chain, Nestlé has put peak carbon behind them following two consecutive years of emissions reduction. The company has reduced absolute GHG emissions by 4.0 million tons.

In 2021, they increased the percentage of renewable electricity sourced to 63.7% in line with their commitment to source 100% renewable electricity across our sites globally by 2025.

27.2% of their global fleet of vehicles switched to lower-emission options.

Nestlé’s bottled-water business, including brands such as Perrier, S.Pellegrino, Vittel and Buxton, aims to advance the regeneration of the water cycle to help create a positive water impact everywhere it operates by 2025.

Their plan is to implement more than 100 projects around their 48 global waters sites, supported by a CHF 120 million investment.

The company has committed to certifying all their Nestlé Waters sites to the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard by 2025.

Nestlé has an ambitious vision where none of their packaging including packages end up in landfills or as litter on land and sea. Their five-pillar strategy to achieve it: reduce, reuse and refill (less packaging), redesign (better packaging), recycle, and rethink behaviors (better systems).

Nestlé has a roadmap of materials to be phased out from packaging, starting with overly complex design of packaging that’s not needed and undetectable materials in 2021.

At year-end 2021, 93.5% of the company’s total packaging and 74.9% of their plastic packaging was designed for recycling. 39.5% was made from renewable materials.

Nestlé is committed to sourcing 100% sustainably produced key ingredients by 2030, including 100% certified sustainable palm oil by 2023 and 100% sustainable cocoa and coffee by 2025.

As of 2021, 16.3% of key ingredients were produced sustainably in 2021.