Nestlé's Darkest Secret: The Disturbing Truth

in the world's poorest countries around one in four children are engaged in child labor the world's biggest food company Nestle the Nestle company Nestle Nestle collects millions of gallons a year from Springs in Southern California would you agree with me that your product should not be used where there is impure water they are taking the water that should not be owned by anybody using indentured servants and parts of Asia because of using child slave labor in parts of Africa they've been trying to steal water everywhere from Brazil to Flint Michigan when it comes to corporations

operating without any regard to human health and safety the Nestle Corporation really seems to be in a league all of its own what's going on with this company Nestle is the largest food and beverage Corporation in the entire world they own over 2 000 different brands and sell chocolate cereal coffee baby food water ice cream and so much more in fact it would be difficult to go shopping and not buy something that's owned by Nestle and yet the company is accused of some truly horrific things including child slavery killing babies exploiting Nepal claiming water shouldn't

be a human right and countless other scandals so what's the truth and if Nestle really is this evil how are they getting away with it this video is a journey into the Dark World of nestle a look behind the curtain at one of the most controversial companies ever but to understand the story of nestle we first need to go back to the man who started it all foreign [Music] [Music] begins with the birth of a boy in Frankfurt in 1814 Henry Nestle was the 11th of 14 children and was born into a family of glaciers

where the trade of cutting and fitting glass had been passed down from father to son for many generations however as Henry got older he became fascinated with chemistry and decided he wanted to become a pharmacist instead of going into the Family Trade which caused a bit of a rift between him and his dads but Henry was determined to follow his own path and at 15 he began working as a pharmacist Apprentice before later leaving his hometown in Germany to go and live in Switzerland where he worked on concocting medicines and chemical experiments it was here

in Switzerland that Henry would start one of the biggest corporations in the world in fact to this day Vive in Switzerland Remains the headquarters of nestle but it wasn't until much later in his life that Henry started Nestle before his big break Henry tried all kinds of different entrepreneurial ideas like he started producing and selling liqueur vinegars rum lemonade and even fertilizers but none of his business ideas ever seem to take off it wasn't until Henry was in his 50s that he finally had his big breakthrough it all began when Henry read a report that

infant mortality had become extremely high because many women couldn't breastfeed their children or their children were allergic to the milk Henry realized this massive problem was also a big opportunity there was clearly a major need for an artificial alternative to breastfeeding but could save countless babies lives and thus Henry began to study all the existing information about breast milk and conduct a series of experiments in his lab with various different ingredients but saving children's lives wasn't the only thing that pushed Henry day and night to find a breast milk substitutes his own tragedy also played

a part as Henry's wife had had many health issues of her own unless it was unable to give birth so as a way to channel her maternal instincts she became extremely concerned about other people's babies and pushed Henry to create a breast milk substitute that could save lives and by 1867 he'd succeeded Henry had created one of the first ever baby formulas essentially a formulated mixture of cow's milk flour and sugar which could be a substitute to natural breast milk Henry then created a company called Nestle to begin selling it and so you see Nestle

began with such great intentions a humble guy creating a life-saving product for babies who couldn't breastfeed naturally unfortunately this isn't a heartwarming success story if anything this is a horror movie you see ola's baby food was the product that started Nestle's dominance it was also the product that would later destroy lives and create an international Scandal and as Nestle grew into a giant conglomerate they became shrouded in all kinds of dark controversies but we'll get to that at first Henry's new baby formula was a big success orders were coming in so quickly that Henry had

to open up a factory to keep up with the demand he couldn't believe it everything was happening so fast and money was pouring in with the huge success of this first product Henry then partnered with a Swiss chocolatier to create another new product and in 1875 Baker did the first chocolate milk in the space of just a couple of years Henry went from being a small unknown pharmacist in Switzerland to one of the richest men in the country and Nestle was growing more and more every month but in a way it was all a bit

too much for Henry who was entering the final stages of his life and wanted to relax and spend more time with his wife and so a few years later Henry decided to retire and sell his company and this is where things get really interesting you see the new owners who took over Nestle had big plans to expand the company and in 1905 they merged with a rival business who sold similar products called Anglo Suess and together they became known as the Nestle Group by pooling all their resources together instead of competing it allowed them to

more easily dominate the market and expand their product Lines by the 1920s Nestle was creating new chocolates and different Beverages and by 1938 they created the first mass-market coffee their timing was great as instant coffee helped keep soldiers awake during the second world war and thus it became included in all emergency rations of every U.S soldier as well as creating new products the Nestle group quite often just acquired other companies they saw potential in or that they thought could be serious competition and so as the years went by Nestle's list of products grew and grew

and so did their wealth and power unfortunately that wasn't enough for them and a behind the scenes a plan was being hatched a plan that would make millions of dollars at risk of millions of lives thank you [Music] when Henry Nestle first created his baby formula back in 1867 the whole idea was a supplement to help mothers who couldn't breastfeed their children certainly not to try and replace breast milk altogether and the reason for that is Studies have shown that natural breast milk is healthier than any formula natural breast milk is widely recommended by the

World Health Organization American Medical Association UNICEF and countless others so for a while baby formula was sold simply as an alternative for those who needed it but in the 1970s roughly a hundred years after the company first began sales seemed to be slowing down and Nestle started to get greedy they wondered why if we could sell this baby formula to all mothers not just those who actually need air you see despite all the other products Nestle had launched baby formula was still one of Nestle's biggest money makers and that's because it has very high profit

margins so imagine how much more money they could make if they could expand their Market to all mothers so neste began a campaign to undermine breast milk and aggressively advertise their baby formula as being Superior manipulating mothers into believing Nestle's formula was a necessity for the health of their babies and that it would be better for their child than breastfeeding when in reality the evidence was the opposite Nestle's formula was vastly inferior to Natural milk as it lacked many of the nutrients that helped babies fight off disease and keep them healthy by encouraging mothers to

switch when they didn't need to it was putting their babies at a higher risk of infection and malnutrition in order to make sure mothers believe this information though Nestle began paying off doctors and hospitals to Peddle their formula by asking them to tell mothers it was better than breastfeeding Nestle then ramped this up further in Africa and Asia where they would hire sales women to dress up like nurses and convince mothers to give up breastfeeding and use their formula instead these sales women were paid on commission meaning the more formula they sold the more money

they made thus encouraging them to sell the formula very aggressively which they did these sales women posing as genuine nurses Would Walk The Halls of maternity Wards or even visit mothers at their homes unannounced and sell them on Nestle's baby formula and it gets much worse Nestle got these fake nurses to hand out free samples of their formula to mothers except they gave them just enough samples that by the time the samples ran out the mothers would have stopped producing milk naturally and this had no choice but to pay for neste's expensive product to keep

their child alive this proved to be very successful and profitable for Nestle and so they expanded this plan to many other locations but especially developing nations where many of the women weren't educated enough to know the information they were being fed wasn't true after all if a woman who appears to be a qualified nurse is telling you that your baby needs this product you're just gonna believe them of course the consequences were fatal it's estimated millions of babies died or were made severely deficient in essential nutrients because of this the worst impact was in third

world countries where there was no access to clean water the big problem was that the baby formula had to be mixed with water and yet Nestle was convincing people they needed to use this baby formula in places where clean water was in very short supply so the formula was getting mixed with water that was polluted and contaminated that's making the babies ill to make matters even worse because many of these women couldn't afford to keep buying the baby formula that their babies now depended on they instead diluted it with even more water which meant that

the babies didn't get enough of the nutrients they needed from the formula leading to malnutrition it didn't help that the instructions on the packaging were in English which most of the mothers in these countries couldn't read so they didn't even realize that by diluting it so much they were starving their children this also meant many of them didn't know they needed to boil the water first to prevent bacteria making their baby sick for a while Nestle did nothing about any of this and seemed to be getting away with it all but then in 1974 a

publication entitled the baby killer specifically called out the serious consequences of aggressively pushing baby formula in these countries Nestle was listed for its involvement in creating a need that didn't exist before 4 then convincing consumers the product was necessary and then getting them hooked on it all was completely ignoring the tragic consequences when this was translated into German by Swiss campaigners it was given the very blunt title Nestle kills babies which led to Nestle taking legal action against them but it was all too late all this coverage created an international Scandal for Nestle and boycotts

were launched against them in numerous countries despite this the company remained quiet on the issue however they couldn't run from this in 1978 Nestle Executives were brought before the U.S Senate for questioning about the impact of neste's formula milk on all of these sick or dying infants and soon after new regulations were introduced by the World Health Organization that said companies couldn't compare breast milk with formula milk Alternatives in their ads whilst this helped him well-regulated countries in much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific the regulations and laws were not so well enforced meaning Nestle

doubled down on their marketing and many of these underdeveloped countries with less restrictions unless their cells continue to increase meanwhile back in places like the US where sales had stalled unless they tried to change their tarnished image and promote breast milk by using some very bizarre ads featuring something called the super babies the idea was to try and distance themselves from the negative media attention they'd received by making out like they'd totally changed despite the fact they were still using the same exploitative tactics to push their formula in countries where they could still get away

with it if even as recently as 2018 a report by save the children found the health of millions of vulnerable children were being put at risk because of the aggressive marketing tactics used by Nestle and several other giant corporations and yet despite all of the extremely serious problems that tactics have caused I'm sorry to say that when it comes to Nestle's dark pasts we're only just getting started [Music] foreign five the neste CEO implied that having access to water wasn't a basic human rights this was uh the zest has many certainty and foreign after the

media criticized him for this he later backtracked but to see how he really feels we can simply look at Nestle's actions when it comes to water for example in Pakistan in 2013 Nestle began diverting clean drinking water away from Villages and towns and then began bottling air in their factories and selling it back to the same people they took the water from but at a much much higher price the big issue is that Nestle had taken so much water that thousands were forced to drink dirty sludge water instead because these people couldn't afford to buy

the expensive bottled water which remember was theirs to begin with Nestle's strategy was essentially to deprive people of a necessity like clean water and then Supply them an expensive alternative since Nestle arrived in the country there are claims they have sucked the land dry and caused water levels to sink hundreds of feeds and it's not just in developing countries where neste does this for example in America when California was suffering from droughts many companies moved their operations out of the state but but not Nestle in the midst of this very serious water shortage Nestle Waters

continued to pump 705 million gallons of fresh water from California's national parks draining some of the state's remaining Water Resources to sell back to Californians and when asked about this the Nestle Water CEO said that if he could bottle more of California's water for profit during the drought he would likewise in Michigan it was reported Nest a pumped 747 liters of fresh water every minute out of the state reserves and that neste pays only 200 to take 130 million gallons of Michigan's water after Nestle caused a drastic reduction in the state's water levels a judge

eventually ordered neste to stop its operations due to the ecological harm they were causing whilst it's perhaps not widely known the reality is Nestle has the largest bottle water operation in the world and owned over 50 brands of bottled water so Nestle are actually incentivized to Target places with limited clean water available from their own natural resources because if they buy up lots of the natural water supplies and create a shortage a great is massive demands if you've seen Mad Max Fury Road you may remember the guy who was holding all the water and that's

not truly similar from neste's approach but perhaps when Nestle got a lot of their inspiration was the classic British show Only Fools and Horses in one episode the characters decide to sell bottled water by claiming it came from a natural spring when really it just came straight out of the tap now this show was a comedy but Nestle decided to basically do that in real life Nestle has simply bottled up water that comes from the exact same Municipal supplies as tap water and advertised there as coming from Clear Mountain Springs thus allowing them to add

a huge markup to the price when in fact they can buy a tank of this water for ten dollars use it to fill thousands of plastic bottles and resell this glorified tap water for an estimated fifty thousand dollars before we get to the next chapter can we all just agree that traditional education is broken memorizing a textbook for an exam or listening to someone lecture you for hours is not the most effective way to learn and it's not enjoyable either which is why I want to tell you about today's video sponsor brilliant if you want

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link in the description then you can get started completely for free honestly brilliant is awesome for learning new skills they add exclusive content every month and I think you'll love it so click the link below now to get started [Music] when you pick up a chocolate bar probably the last thing on your mind is how that chocolate bar was made but the brutal truth is that Nestle has been found to use forced labor and even child slavery on the farms where the cocoa beans are harvested and for a while this cheap exploitative labor went mostly

unnoticed leading to low costs and high profits but then in the year 2000 a report came out that said Nestle was guilty of buying blood chocolates and unless they was fully aware that enslaved children were working on their plantations now this was also true for many of the big chocolate companies so in the year 2000 Nestle Cadbury and Mars all promised to make their chocolate slavery by 2005 except they didn't the years flew by and they kept missing all the deadlines they set in fact in 2005 the international labor rights fund filed a lawsuit against

Nestle and other chocolate manufacturing companies on behalf of three Malian children alleging the children were trafficked to the Ivory Coast forced into slavery and frequently beat eaten on the chocolate Plantation neste's response to incidents like this was always the same they said it was impossible to keep track of everything going on on these plantations but they vowed to try and improve their situation but then a few more years passed and it seemed like nothing had really changed in 2010 a documentary called The Dark Side of chocolate brought attention to the media about how children were

being stolen away from their homes and families are being forced to work on plantations for very little or no money at all then an investigation in 2020 discovered that children as young as eight were picking coffee on the farms of one of Nestle's suppliers it was reported children work seven days a week carrying sacks that weighed twice their weight and got paid around one dollar an hour for their work however once again at nestled denied knowledge of this and said they tried to fix it and to be fair here this is a complex issue that's

certainly not limited just to Nestle but what does seem clear is Nestle have known about these labor problems for decades and with their billions of dollars they could surely have done a lot more if they really wanted to the only time they seem to show signs of action against these brutal working conditions was when they were getting negative press and there's another example of this with what happened in Ethiopia in 2002 neste was demanding six million dollars from the government of Ethiopia one of the poorest countries on the planet the conflict dated back to the

1970s when a military regime in Ethiopia seized all the assets of foreign companies and nationalized them and then many years after this one of those companies that had its asset seized was acquired by Nestle who were now demanding compensation now remember this was a business that was nationalized under a different government 27 years ago and a business which Nestle didn't even own at the time but still to be fair to Nestle here technically they were entitled to claim compensation but here's the issue at the time they were making this demand for six million dollars Ethiopia

was facing an extreme famine that threatened the lives of 15 million people the country was in extreme poverty with many citizens making less than a hundred dollars a year that six million dollars could help provide clean water to millions of Ethiopians it could quite literally say save lives but despite being aware of this and despite the fact Nest they made around 65 billion dollars in sales that same year Nestle initially refused to let Ethiopia off the hook and persistently demanded the money even though six million dollars was nothing to Nestle they said it was the

principle of the matter that was important however once the media picked the story up and people started threatening to boycott their sleigh they immediately did a u-turn and settled the debt for 1.5 million dollars instead and vowed to reinvest it into the country's economy but it seems pretty clear if it wasn't for the potential PR nightmare they had no intention of backing down and if you thought Nestle's controversies ended there think again in 2012 the competition Bureau raided the offices of nestle to investigate price fixing claiming Nestle was making deals with other chocolate companies to

ensure they all kept their prices equally high so they didn't undercut each other and give customers a better deal neste denied any collusion but eventually settled for a 9 million settlement the following year ordinarily this might be quite a big controversy but in the context of everything else they've been accused stuff it doesn't even seem that bad comparatively and to be honest we could go on for a while listing allegations against the company like the legal dispute that claimed dog food produced by Nestle Purina pet care resulted in serious illness and death of thousands of

dogs or we could talk about Nestle's terrible pollution stats but here's the thing because of all these scandals Nestle have been involved in many people have tried to boycott Nestle products but the company is so vast that it's incredibly difficult because there's just so many different products they sell they have reached in almost every country with products in so many different categories when you buy food water or even cosmetics without realizing it you may be buying from a Nestle brand which is probably why despite all of these controversies their Slayers continued to grow and make

more Acquisitions to become even more powerful and to be fair I'm sure there are many people working at Nestle who just want to make good products in a perfectly ethical way the issue is that when Henry Nestle founded the company he was solving a very genuine problem but unfortunate as an essay grew their business model later started creating problems instead so they could sell you the solution of course when you've been around for hundreds of years and owned so many Brands I guess some scandals are kind of inevitable just ask Coca-Cola to see the disturbing

history of coke just click right here I'll hopefully see you there cheers [Music]