it’s almost like these global megacorporations can’t be trusted to quality-control anywhere they think they can get away with selling garbage. I hope India considers antitrust action, criminal prosecution, and nationalizing instead of slap-on-the-wrist fines.
They’re up to their old baby killing tricks again.
From the company that steals your water and sells it back to you.
They have a well known baby formula scandal too. They used unethical advertising practices to get women in developing countries started on free baby formula, and then the women had to keep buying the formula when the natural lactation stopped.
They would then have trouble sourcing clean water and clean equipment, causing the babies to get sick. They would also try to stretch the formula because of financial limitations, and the babies would be malnourished
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestlé_boycott
Advocacy groups and charities have accused Nestlé of unethical methods of promoting infant formula over breast milk to poor mothers in developing countries.[23][24] For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula. IBFAN also alleges that Nestlé uses “humanitarian aid” to create markets, does not label its products in a language appropriate to the countries where they are sold, and offers gifts and sponsorship to influence health workers to promote its products.[25] The company not only made use of mass media promotion (e.g. billboards and posters) and sample distributions, they also had sales people dressed as so-called “milk nurses” to visit mothers in hospital and at their home to praise formula and its benefits.[26][27][10] Nestlé justified its actions by rejecting the responsibility for e.g. the lack of clean water in many developing countries and further argued with freedom of consumer choice, which in the company’s opinion allows for formula products to be sold in developing markets
Aside of all that, they were also poisoning babies in Eastern Europe as recently as 16 years ago. Their Gerber brand of baby food had two tiers of meat products for babies as young as 6 m.o… The ones sold in Western Europe were 100% meat. Identical looking jars manufactured for Eastern Europe had only 50% meat. The rest was indigestible for babies “mechanically separated meat”, which is industry term for whatever’s left after thinly minced bones, feathers and claws are forced through a sieve. Babies don’t produce enzymes necessary to digest any of that. They eat very little, so nutritionally empty “food” isn’t something that can be easily compensated for, and it impacts their development. Oh, and before anyone brings up the economical differences between Eastern and Western Europe: the better quality foods made for western markets were on average sold slightly cheaper than their Eastern counterparts.
Explaining it all with pure greed is actually generous. Because it also fits a pattern of neocolonialism and a concerted effort to make Eastern Europeans slightly weaker, dumber and easier to exploit. Even greedy people would usually stop short of actually poisoning babies, right? It wasn’t a mistake or a manufacturing error. Labels were printed with the ingredients listed (however misleading, because “mechanically separated meat” contains little to no meat at all). It was a deliberate choice, made by well informed people. But also merely a blip on a long list of their crimes.
