Nestlé
Profile
Nestlé is a global company and home to some of the world’s most recognizable and trusted brands. With over CHF 88 bn in sales in 2015, Nestlé is the world’s largest food company. With our Nutrition, Health and Wellness strategy, we support people who want to live a healthier lifestyle. We take pride in providing our consumers with products and services of the highest quality, building trust with every consumer contact we make. By sharing our insights, building partnerships and by engaging with policymakers and other stakeholders, we strive to have a positive impact on society. For our business to prosper over the longterm, we must deliver value to the communities where we have a presence and to society as a whole, as well as to our shareholders. This is what we call Creating Shared Value.
Competences & Capabilities
Put simply, Nestle Research is the engineof innovation for Nestle. Our task at NestleResearch is to convert exemplary scientificexpertise and knowledge into productinnovations and renovations in line with ourNutrition, Health and Wellness ambition. We dothis through product and technology leadershipthat has a positive business impact basedon our ‘Discover-Develop-Deploy’ approach.Our work affects every aspect and touchpointof the business. It means going beyondproducts and technologies. It means findingsolutions across the value chain that makegood, long - term business sense – and createvalue for society. All that we do is consumerbased.A major part of our work is to deliverproducts that offer superior nutrition, healthand wellness in a forward-looking and creativeway. To achieve our goal and fuel sustainablesuccess for Nestlé, we have the largest researchnetwork of any food company in the world, with39 Research facilities, and over 5000 peopleinvolved.
Expertise related to the EIT Food Strategic Pillars
Innovation boosts our ability to deliver products to the consumer which they can trust, manufactured to the highest specifications and completely safe. Our researchers deliver innovation we can apply throughout the value chain from the sourcing of ingredients, to manufacturing, packaging and distribution, and to offer consumers new types of product or services, or benefits through our brands. In addition, we are driving advances in agricultural practices and biotechnology to help secure the food supply, from developing new preservation technology to contributing to better food safety. We are improving our ability to produce more with less environmental impact, reducing carbon emissions, water consumption and waste. At the same time, we are working hard to identify ingredients we use with less environmental impact and find ways to accelerate the usage of plant proteins.
The Nestlé Research Center (NRC) in Lausanne, Switzerland – the world’s largest private food and nutrition research institute has published over 1000 scientific publications in peer review journals and files over 80 patents annually.
Under the Corporate R&D function of Open Innovation & Venturing, broadly speaking, we engage with 3 segments for bringing in external innovation and creating new business opportunities in Nestlé:
- Industry innovation partnerships: We collaborate with a range of industry partners, both large multinationals and SMEs with technological differentiation for innovation and renovation projects leading to industrialization.
- Academic alliances: We partner with leading academic institutions globally for path breaking, jointly funded fundamental research for advances in food and nutrition.
- Venturing: We actively scout for technologies and make venture investments in start-ups which can further drive external innovation and new business creation into Nestlé.
We are committed to contributing to the higher education of the next generation of nutrition and food science scientists and participate, for instance, in Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska- Curie Actions. We sponsor PhD Theses worldwide.