Why Nestle Is the Worst

What is the most evil company in the world? Exxon, who depletes oil wells and poisons our atmosphere? Or Philip Morris, who continues to manufacture cigarettes even after millions of people have died from smoking them? Maybe Monsanto, who exploit the agricultural industry and alter our food to stay profitable?

Well, all of these companies are bad in some sense, but one company is worse than all of them combined: the most evil business in the world, Nestlé. Nestlé is the biggest food manufacturer in the world, with over 2,000 different brands produced in over 400 factories in 189 countries. The company makes around 100 billion dollars in sales annually from Perrier and espresso, Coffee-Mate, Hot Pockets, KitKat, Crunch bars, Trader's ice cream, Power Bars, L'Oréal, Purina. It would be difficult, if not almost impossible, for you to go through life without using one of their products.

In 1867, troubled by the high infant death rate, Henry Nestlé created baby formula, a milk-based substitute for babies who couldn't have breast milk. Nestlé had excellent intentions and never marketed its product as better than breast milk. Sadly, after his death, integrity seemed to disappear from the company. In the 1970s, cigarettes were in their heyday, largely thanks to misleading and expertly crafted advertising campaigns around them. Nestlé took a page from Big Tobacco's notebook and executed a similarly deceiving campaign to push its baby formula on the masses.

Through paid doctors and shady advertisements, Nestlé convinced much of the public that formula was better than natural breast milk—an undeniably false claim. But their deceit didn't stop there. Nestlé then hired hundreds of saleswomen in Africa and Asia, dressed them up like nurses, and sent them to local communities to profess the false benefits of baby formula to mothers all over the developing countries.

At the discretion of Nestlé, these saleswomen gave formula samples to nursing mothers that would last just long enough for the mother to stop producing milk but not long enough to feed the baby until they could be weaned. When the formula samples ran out, mothers who were no longer able to nurse had to buy more formula from Nestlé. But since many of these women couldn't afford formula or the milk it was supposed to be mixed with, they began diluting it with water.

In areas where education, especially for women, wasn't always so comprehensive, many women didn't know that the water they were giving their babies was often contaminated. Millions of infants died due to the contamination. Millions of others grew up nutritionally deficient.

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Back to our story. In 1978, Nestlé executives were called before the United States Senate to explain why babies were dying after being given formula. But like most corporations, it refused to take responsibility for how mothers prepared the baby formula. They weren't totally exonerated, though. In 1981, new regulations were put in place in the United States, making it...