RedHanded - ShortHand: Nestlé & the 'Baby Killer' Scandal

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

What if we told you that the brand responsible for some of your favourite foods and drinks, has also been accused of being responsible for the deaths of over 10 million babies? Yes, you read that correctly. Nestlé, the biggest food and beverage company in the world, is also at the heart of one of the most heinous corporate crime cases in history. This is the ShortHand.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. And welcome to shorthand where we're going to depress you. I know, it is depressing. This is very depressing. But keep listening, please. Yeah. And I have to say that this has re-inspired my boycott. I boycotted Nestle for years.

I mean, honestly, I think... And then I accidentally drank a Nesquick. And I was like, I hate myself. I know. And it's not even that tasty. That's the real shame. But it is sad because it's one of those stories that starts. off with good intentions

and then is just exploited to fuck. In 2013, Forbes ranked Nestle, the biggest food and beverage company in the world, as one of the ten most reputable companies on the planet. And if you have a look at their website,

you can maybe see why. Nestle proudly boasts about their mission to halve their carbon emissions by 2030, and how they're committed to a 100% anti-deforestation supply chain. which is quite literally impossible. So much greenwashing.

So much greenwashing. I know people that work in PR and they're like literally every single company that comes to us is like, can you just greenwash? Just greenwash? Fuck off. Yeah. Can we be carbon neutral?

And they're like, you can. Doesn't mean anything. Anyway, what Nestle's website doesn't mention is that Nestle have been accused of child slave labour, claiming clean water isn't a human right, and mass exploitation of the poor. And their carefully crafted PR greenwashing website also of course ignores the fact that in 2018

the National Bureau of Economic Research conducted a study which estimated that 10,870,000 infants between 1960 and 2015, died as a direct result of Nestle baby formula, used by mothers in low and middle-income countries without clean water sources. That is more than the population of London. And these infant deaths peaked at 212,000 in 1981 alone.

The Nesley Baby Killing Scandal is one of the most heinous corporate crime cases you're ever likely to encounter. This is the shorthand. I think it's one of those stories that everyone kind of knows, but because it is so awful, they don't think it's true. Yeah, and I think it's also like, Corporate crime case, I know that's what it is, but that feels like the not right word. The biggest cases of mass murder.

The Nestle's story begins in Frankfurt, Germany, where Omri Nesley was born on the 10th of August 1814. He was the 11th of 14 children and was expected to join the family business as a glaze. A what? Glazier. As a glazier. What's a glazier? Oh, it's like a people who make and fit glass. So if your window breaks, call a glazier.

The glass man. But Henri was not interested in being a glass man. He had other ambitions. He studied chemistry and at the age of 20 began a four-year apprenticeship at a pharmacy in Frankfurt before leaving Germany for Switzerland in the late 1830s. By 1840, Henri's entrepreneurial spirit led him to try his hand at making everything

from nut oils, liquors, rum, vinegar, absinthe, lemonade and sparkling mineral water. But none of his products seemed to take off. until he spotted a gap in the market. At that time, Western Europe was experiencing high levels of infant mortality, not just among the poor, but also in high society. There was not only the ongoing European food crisis, because fresh cow's milk was in short supply in many large towns,

but breastfeeding had also fallen out of fashion, especially among the upper classes. There was an urgent need for an alternative to breast milk, and in 1867, Henri found the solution. By combining cow's milk with grain and sugar and removing the acid and starch in the wheat flour, which is difficult for babies to digest, Henri created the world's first powdered baby formula.

Marketing it as Henri Nesley milk flour, which sounds disgusting, it quickly hit the shelves all over Europe and by the 1870s it was being sold in the US as Nestle's infant food. Soon after, in 1857, when Omri and his chocolatier friend Daniel Peter joined forces to create the world's first chocolate milk, Nestle hit the big time. And 140 years later, Nestle would become the largest food and beverage company in the whole wide world, and it would be worth almost 90 billion. 1875 marked the beginning of a major success story for Nestle, but it also marked the beginning of a horror story.

for much of the world. Because that same year, Henri sold his company and retired to spend more time with his family. While the new owners of Nestle focused on taking the Nestle brand global, growing their product range to include everything from baby formula

to chocolate and instant coffee to keep the troops awake during wartime. The new heads of the company were a lot more ruthless in their approach to business than Henri Nestle had ever been, and they did not share the same good intentions. and the company's unethical marketing practices

would go on to have devastating consequences the world over. The popularity of alternatives to breast milk rose massively during the Industrial Revolution, due, among many things, to maternal deaths, labour demands and cultural norms. The rise in female employment saw many women abandoning breastfeeding for artificial alternatives, which usually involved mixtures of cereals, sugar and cow milk.

And wet nursing was for long. out of favour too, because it was seen as unhygienic and immoral, which it is. Just as the rise in popularity of artificial methods was taking place, the science of nutrition was developing rapidly. By the turn of the 20th century, public health authorities in the West proclaimed that the high infant mortality rates were dumanly to contaminated milk supplies. In England, milk was identified as a vector of tuberculosis and typhoid outbreaks. One of Nestle's primary selling points of Henri Nestle's milk flour was their use of pure Alpine Swiss milk

and it's apparently unquestionable hygiene. It makes no difference if you stick it in a glass bottle that can't be clean. Yes, as we found out in our episode on why all the Victorians died, it actually makes it much worse. So in 1904, a news report about Nestle claimed the following. And this is a quote, I read it and reread it. And I was like, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but this is what was written.

so I'm just going to read it here. Although in England, breastfeeding is the rule. In addition to breast milk, in 80% of cases, comes Swiss milk, recommended by the highest and most competent medical authorities, as infinitely superior to fresh milk, even the most pure. And I think there's something here

in the deliberate use of language in Nessace's campaign proclaiming that artificial baby's milk is aligned with the latest scientific nutritional information, and it was very effective. and in 1872 Nessie produced their own brochure written in the very academic tone of a scientific article. This brochure was described by corporate historian Albert Piffner as disguised publicity.

The brochure claimed that irrational food was the main cause of high mortality in infants and that Nessley's baby's milk addressed all of the physiological needs of an infant. The brochure went on to quote a number of prominent professors who had no doubt been paid to approve Nestle's claims, or maybe just like fucking the Sacklers just didn't exist. Oh, yes, absolutely.

This case is almost a blow-by-blow parallel with the Sackler case. These claims were then printed all over newspaper advertisements, their product packaging, and even in medical journals. From the beginning, Nestle's marketing strategy relied heavily on endorsements and testimonials from the medical world. Nestle would instruct their salesmen to go directly to doctors and pharmacists giving them brochures and free samples. Many of the physicians would then prescribe Nestle products to their patients and report what they observed.

And of course, only the positive reports would then be published in medical journals, or in adverts, or in new brochures given to other physicians. This strategy worked wonders, and Nestle's market share grew enormously. But that doesn't mean the medical industry as a whole was buying into this. There was a huge dispute within the community about what constituted the best substitute for breast milk in terms of artificial feeding. And in the US, nutrition experts were among the first to voice their concerns.

Their guidelines made it clear that individually tailored infant formulas prepared in labs were far preferable to these often secretive industrial formulas like Nestle's. They stated in no uncertain terms that these formulas rarely, if ever, met the nutritional needs of infants. And although their disapproval was recorded

at medical industry conventions and in textbooks, the word didn't really spread to the general public. And that's obviously because Nessai have money to spend on convincing the public. These doctors and scientists are just like, we're not going to start a campaign to rival Nesley. They're just making their points heard.

And the reason that Nestle was able to sort of continue its game and it didn't spread to the public was also because in large part, physicians sadly ignored the findings of these experts. They preferred to use their own findings, usually positive empirical evidences with ready to use formula like Nestle's. In the first decades of the 1900s,

skimmed condensed milk was touted as baby food. That is unbelievable. That's what you used to make fudge. Oh, I know. If you just boil condensed milk long enough, you just have fudge. Yep, yep, yep. I mean, it's delicious. But fuck.

Just fucking enormous, baby is just rolling around. Anyway, if you have been lucky enough to avoid condensed milk your entire life, it's essentially milk that has been treated until about 60% of the water content has evaporated and then sugar is put in its place. And babies love it still now, but after. an epidemic of rickets, which is caused by a lack of fat-soluble vitamin D. Doctors observed that there was a link between rickets and infants and an exclusive diet of skimmed condensed milk. I saw on TikTok this morning, the factual encyclopedia of Britannica.

Up until the like 1920s, I want to say, maybe a bit later, all applicants to Harvard and Yale had to submit a naked photograph of themselves to check for scoliosis and rickets. And they are in the Smithsonian to this day. A childhood picture. No, grown up. Oh, right, okay, fine. I don't know what I put that in my head.

Okay. Fuck it, oh. That's wild. But, despite the rickets, many manufacturers, including Nestle themselves, continue to brand their condensed, skimmed milk as infant food. How anyone has any teeth in the 1900s is beyond me. They're all dead by like 40, though. That's true.

And resulting health issues were particularly prevalent amongst poorer communities as they usually are, because condensed milk was much cheaper than baby formulas. This marked the beginning of a war between the medical industry and formula companies. Around the 1920s, nutrition scientists and public health authorities began challenging the scientific claims made by companies like Nestle, which is why Nestle went to huge lengths to establish a relationship with the medical authorities in its home country where that beautiful, delicious, pure, pure, alpine Swiss milk comes from, Switzerland.

And they did this by becoming very involved in Swiss health philanthropy and sponsoring clinical trials of its own infant feeding products. By the 40s, Nessé had stuffed so many pockets in the Swiss medical industry that it was lauded as a champion of child health and humanitarian causes. One Swiss journalist even wrote, Among the innumerable industries that have emerged worldwide, there is one whose entire activity is marked by the following words, serve the child.

Therefore, wherever the food situation of the child becomes worrying, Nestle stands with its products alongside the Red Cross in its magnificent crusade for destitute childhood. Nestle was, at this point, one of the biggest companies in the infant food industry in Europe, but it had its eyes set on broader horizons, namely the developing world. Following the end of World War II,

infant nutrition became a primary focus for a number of new UN organizations, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. The main issue these organizations were faced with in the 50s was the rise of Kwasioko, a condition caused by protein malnutrition that leads to the characteristic swollen belly. It was first described in the 1930s,

by Jamaican-born Oxford-educated physician Dr. Cecily Williams. Dr. Williams was one of the first to warn of the disastrous effects of bottle-feeding, a practice that had arrived in the developing world by way of colonisation in the early 1900s. Williams had investigated the mortality of bottle-fed infants in Malaya and found that early deaths were far more common in artificially fed babies than in those who were breastfed. As early as 1939, Dr Williams gave numerous talks that the misguided propaganda on infant feeding

was to blame for high rates of infant mortality. However, sadly, Dr. Williams' critical view of bottle feeding didn't spread beyond a small ground of experts until it was too late. Quascioko was rampant in Africa and in Latin America in the 50s, and Nestle saw this as an opportunity. Soon enough, Nestle's medical delegates flocked to a Africa to promote their products to colonial doctors as a treatment for malnutrition.

And just like they had done in Switzerland, Nestle funded and ran its own clinical trials in Africa. In 1956, one of Nestle's medical representatives went on a six-week tour of the French African colonies. This representative met with 112 doctors, 60 hospital services, 50 pharmacists and set up 40 clinical experiments. Similar tours were set up in South Africa, British East Africa and the Belgian colonies. The results of the clinical trials on malnourished children were reported to be an astounding success. One report said the following. Under its action, appetite reappeared. Ademas melted in five to six days. The biological syndrome improves. Hepatic lesions regress, and mortality decreases from 80% to 25%. Basically, Nestle's products were the solution to Africa's

crisis, or at least that's what they claimed. These marvellous results were then shared with the colonel medical community at inter-African nutrition conferences. There were also, of course, printed in medical journals and brochures. As a result, by the 1960s, Nestle saw a huge surge in sales of their products in the African continent. Then, in March 1974, the British non-profit War on Want published a damning pamphlet, entitled The Baby Killer. It is nice when something isn't our fault for once.

The pamphlet was a powerful attack on the baby formula industry and revealed the devastating impact that Nestle had made in the developing world. All of the questionable sales and marketing practices Nestle carried out were finally exposed. The company would dress up their attractive saleswomen in nurses' outfits and send them out to hospitals and pharmacies. They'd even sneakily copy the names and addresses of new mothers who had just given birth from hospital records and visit them at home.

When they weren't doing this, they'd go as far as wandering residential streets and spotting which homes had baby clothes drying out front. What sort of commission have they got these people on that they're doing this shit? Because these saleswomen would then sit and convince these mothers using the company's brochure that Nestle's baby formula

was better for their baby than their own breast milk was. And that not using it could have feds consequences, when of course the opposite was true. They would then hand out just enough free samples of their baby formula that by the time these women ran out, they would have stopped lactating due to not breastfeeding, something which is not easy to reverse. So then, once the mothers had stopped lactating,

their infants were now completely dependent on the baby formula. And because baby formula was quite expensive after you'd run out of your free trial, these mothers would then have to try and make it last as long as possible by diluting it as much as they could. And once they ran out of baby formula, they often couldn't afford to buy any more, and by that point also unable to produce their own breast milk. So that meant mothers had no choice, but to resort to feeding their own children cornstarch or whole milk. What's more, many of these mothers lived in impoverished conditions without access to clean drinking water,

sterilised equipment or refrigeration. all of which are required to safely use baby formula. Also, the packaging and instructions for Nestle's baby formula were never in the local language. They were either in English or they were in French. And as a result of this, in the late 1960s, medical authorities began reporting a huge rise in malnourished infants, correlating to the rise in the use of baby formula.

The baby killer pamphlet was then translated into German by Burn Base Third World Action Group, AGWD. This time with the title, Nestle kills babies. And it was also published in Switzerland. Nestle responded by suing the organisation, but this move completely backfired. All the lawsuit did, it's the Barbara Streisand effect. It's the Barbara Streisand effect, because all the lawsuit did was raise the publicity of the baby killer pamphlet and an international scandal against the company was triggered. After a two-year-long trial, the judge ruled in of Nestle, saying that they couldn't be held responsible for the infant deaths in terms of

criminal law. However, the defendants were only fined $400 instead of the $5 million that Nestle was suing for. The judge also ordered Nestle to, quote, modify their publicity methods fundamentally. Time magazine declared this a moral victory for the AGWD. In 1977, US campaigners launched a boycott against Nestle and quickly gained traction in Britain's Switzerland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and much more of Europe. This boycott is somewhat unique, as it wasn't about labour abuses or creating political pressure against a government. The Nesley boycott linked human rights regulations and humanitarian activism with corporate responsibility. The goal was to limit the power of huge multinationals

like Nesley and force them to create a more ethical form of market capitalism. In 1978, executives from Nesley were brought before the US Senate for questioning about Nestle's responsibility for the deaths and illnesses of infants. But instead of acknowledging any wrongdoing, the representatives continue to dodge any responsibility. They blamed the poor water supplies of the countries, and even the mothers themselves were misusing the products. The following year, the World Health Organization and UNICEF held an international meeting, calling for the creation of the International Code of Marketing of Breast's Milk Substitutes. This was aimed at setting standards of global corporate responsibility.

However, even though the WHO didn't have the means to enforce this, it did manage to apply enough pressure to get Nestle to change its marketing strategies, for the time being anyway. In 1984, Nestle agreed to implement the code, signed an unprecedented agreement with the non-governmental critics, and ended the seven-year international boycott. Part of the code meant that Nestle wasn't allowed, to claim that baby formula was the equivalent of breast milk.

But in the years since, Nestle signed that agreement. They have been found to be in breach of it numerous times all over the world. And the Nestle Baby Killer boycott continues to this day. Ugh. Humans, man. I've had enough. It's so grim. Take me with you, Elon. It's so, so grim.

But that's it, guys. That is the shorthand on the Nestle Baby Killer scandal. and why we should all definitely not buy any fucking Kit Katz. Oh God, not Kit Katz. I think Kit Kat. I think you're right. I think it's a Kit Kat. So don't have a break unless you're missing.

Have a break for murdering babies, you sick fuck. Oh, no Kits. No smarties. No Milky bars. No Lion bars, no Aeros. Oh, I love an arrow. Well, they... I will give it up.

Okay. Though I cannot remember the last time I ate an arrow. So it's fine. They're in the bin. But that's it, guys. We will see you next week for something else. Goodbye. Bye.