Nestlé gives a flavour of the future

SWITZERLAND IS KNOWNSAP3G3G for its timepieces. But it is also home to another business that for most of its history has operated with metronomic regularity. That is Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company. Established in the 1860s in Vevey, a small town on the shores of Lake Geneva that remains its home to this day, it has long been seen as an opaque behemoth with an insular culture and the occasional brush with scandal. Yet a billion of its products are consumed every day. Its sales last year surpassed $93bn. When it talks coffee, it talks in 100bn cupfulls. Data may be the new oil in America and Asia, but in Europe hot beverages are hotter than either crude or computing. With a market value of $320bn, Nestlé is worth more than Royal Dutch Shell, the continent’s biggest energy firm, and , its software giant.Many global food firms have been models of reliability. Other venerable names, such as Campbell’s, Danone, Kraft Heinz and Unilever (which sells more non-food items than food), also have roots stretching back over a century. Yet five years ago, amid a sharp slowdown in growth, the industry suddenly found itself under siege. , a Brazilian private-equity group with a zeal for ruthless cost-cutting, merged H.J. Heinz and Kraft Foods. Two years later American activists targeted Nestlé, demanding the same recipe. The same year Kraft Heinz tried and failed to take over Unilever, and later saw its profits tumble, leaving ’s reputation in tatters.