An Investigative Study on The Claims of Nestle Causing Deaths of Thousands of Babies

Nestle is a large food processing company that had world wide sales of over 8 billion dollars and has been accused of killing babies before. The company aggressively markets their products to poverty stricken countries, and it has affected these countries far too much. Since they market feeding formula to these countries it has been shown that this causes to the parents to misinterpret what they have to do with this feeding formula. Throughout this paper we are going to verify the claim that Nestle contributed to the death of thousands of infants.

Historical Context of Nestle's Marketing Practices

After researching we found plethora of articles that help support the claims against Nestle. One of them being, Nestle Kills Babies: An inside Look at the 1970′s Baby Formula Scandal. This article first mentions how “In 1974, British magazine War on Want published a 35 page expose titled “The Baby Killer.” (3) The article goes on and exposes the following things about Nestles baby product. It appealed to third world women's desire for westernization, they provided pamphlets only listing the benefits of the formula, they hired sales people to dress in nurse’s outfits to deliver free samples of the formula to mothers which promoted the product, and also would work deals out with hospitals to promote the baby formula even more. In return for pushing the formula, hospitals received, “millions of dollars subsidizing office furnishings, research projects, gifts, conferences, publications and travel junkets of the medical profession." (2) We also came across articles with scientific proof to backup the claims against Nestle. One of the articles was The Controversy over Infant Formula which was published on December 6, 1981 by the New York Times. It explains how a team of physicians conducted research on some of the mothers who are affected by the aggressive marketing from Nestle Company.

The Emergence of Activism Against Nestle

When this issue first surfaced there were limited possibilities for activists to make the accusations public. One way was shown by the creation of “The Baby Killer” which, “really blew the lid off the baby formula industry.” (2) The title of this expose helped catch the audience’s attention right away. Newspaper and magazine articles were definitely the best option back then to publicize information but today we have made advancements one being social media.

Leveraging Social Media for Awareness

Social networks help spread news faster than any other media and have taken “word of mouth” to a whole new level. This is why if Nestle were still demonstrating these unethical actions today we would choose to take the social network route to stop them. We would form a social interest group and by creating a social media campaign we could inform and educate the public. We would first create informational websites then a Facebook and Twitter account. On our twitter account we could post not only facts but links to our websites and Facebook page which provide further information. By creating a twitter account we could look into getting promotional tweets so they would reach an even wider range of people than just our followers. We could also look into celebrity endorsements so that they can tweet about our organization and re-tweet our tweets.

Engagement with Affected Communities

Since there the third-world countries who are actually being affected do not have as much, if any, access to social networks we could send, the celebrities in which we choose to endorse, overseas to speak and inform those citizens. We would also have fundraisers, possibly with the celebrities, to raise money which would be used to buy formula for the mothers being affected. We would also provide a way to donate through our website. Raising this money would be important because not only do the mothers need new, uncontaminated formula but they need plenty of it because “many poor mothers use less formula powder than is necessary, in order to make a container of formula last longer [and] some infants receive inadequate nutrition from weak solutions of formula.” (4) Also, if a mother were to run out of formula she would not have a backup way to feed her infant because her breast milk would dry up from disuse.

Conclusion: Taking Action Against Unethical Practices

The only way to really get Nestle to stop their unethical actions and bring forth their social values is to put them on the spot and a social media campaign is just the way to do so.