Ever feel like some things are just inherently f#$%ed? That’s how I feel about Nestlé. I used to find it appalling and tragic that Nestlé convinced women around the world that baby formula was better than breast feeding. Later, as I traveled through South and Central America, I was disgusted that the only coffee available in coffee-producing regions was Nescafé. I can’t even talk about their bottled water. And now? Folks, Nestlé has raised the bar on predatory practices.
I was reading a piece on AlterNet last night about the Nestlé’s latest “service” to the world: the Nestlé barge.
“The first Nestlé floating supermarket will set sail on the Brazilian Amazon to extend its reach to over 800,000 customers.” The barge is dubbed Nestlé Até Você a Bordo — or Nestlé Takes You Onboard.
So who is Nestlé taking on board and why? Well, Nestlé feels like remote living and poverty should not be barriers to accessing their wide-array of packaged crap. Oh, but get this, they plan to create special, smaller versions of their goods to lower the price point to what they consider to be accessible — you know, get folks addicted first. They’ve even added additional fortification to some of their products to justify the move as some sort of social service.
I mean, really, WTF would folks do without Nestlé Toll House Cookies?
And the kicker? Nestlé has held the No. 1 spot in its category on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list every year but one since 1998, especially for its ability to “tailor products to local niches while leveraging its size.” Oh, wait, here’s my favourite quote from a recent piece on CNN.com:
Nestlé’s research also helped it realize that health and nutrition were the future long before most of us had heard of probiotic yogurt. Its 60/40+ strategy means that, when testing a new product, it wants consumers to prefer its products over its competitors’ six out of 10 times, and that it wants them to have added nutrition (the plus). As for the recent acquisition of Kraft’s frozen pizza business? “There’s no unhealthy food,” asserts Bulcke [Nestlé CEO]. “There are unhealthy diets.”
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