On course for net zero at Nestlé

Nestlé is aiming to be a net zero business by 2050 and in fact, achieved its 2025 target a year early. The Manufacturer Editor Joe Bush caught up with Emma Keller, the company’s Head of Sustainability for UK and Ireland, to find out what net zero at Nestlé looks like.

The role and importance of sustainability within manufacturing businesses has changed beyond recognition over the last decade and nowhere is this better illustrated than at Nestlé. When Emma entered the business five years ago she was flying solo as the company’s sustainability lead; now she heads a growing team working across all business categories, whether that be coffee, confectionery or pet food.

FAQs

• What does the sustainability strategy look like at Nestlé?
• How are global events changing how Nestlé operate?
• How are consumer demands changing the way Nestlé manufacturer its products?
• What challenges are Nestlé facing around raw material supply and how are they being navigated?
• As Nestlé depends on nature and a balanced ecosystem, how is the company working with growers/farmers to enhance ecology and the environment?
• How is supply chain resilience linked to sustainability?

This is a recognition that in order to meet the scale of commitments that a business like Nestlé has set itself, it needs resources and experts in place. This has reached the point where sustainability is now embedded within the DNA of the business.

Not only that but Emma explained that the role has evolved into an extremely dynamic position which can vary from day-to-day – and can include writing business cases for new sustainability projects, being in Parliament to try and influence policy makers and advance sustainability agendas, and spending time talking to growers and farmers about more regenerative methods. Emma picks up the story.

What does Nestlé’s sustainability strategy look like?

EK: Even in changing times, we’re not compromising on the sustainability goals we’ve set, and like many big businesses, we have a number of different commitments. Our overarching promise as Nestlé is to advance regenerative food systems at scale.

As one of the world’s largest food and drink companies, this is about recognising that the products we manufacture depend on nature and farming systems. So that word ‘regenerative’ is really important for us.

For us regenerative is about putting more back than we take out. It’s about moving away from farming systems that were degenerative and depleting soil and nature, and making them, firstly, sustainable i.e., doing less harm, through to regenerative where we restore and replenish. We also want to play a leading role in this transition, supporting others along the journey of change at the scale and pace needed, so the word ‘advance’ is important for us too.

Underneath this promise, we’ve got some ambitious pledges. We’re committed to being a net zero business by 2050, and to halve our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. 2050 is a far-away target for a business to work towards so having a 2030 milestone is crucial to keep focus and to be able to better track emissions going down over time.

In our latest report we were able to show that we actually met our 2025 commitment (20% emission reduction) a year early – hitting just over 21% by the end of 2024. We’re showing that some of our sustainability initiatives are really starting to deliver. Of course, there’s still a big leap between 20% and 50% over the next five years, but it’s important to demonstrate the progress being made and give confidence that we are on the right trajectory.

And this progress has taken time to achieve. Looking back to the few years after we set our commitments, initially emissions went up slightly, before we reached peak carbon in 2019; they have been coming down ever since. We’ve learned a lot along the way.

What’s clear is that not only does it take time to develop, build and scale projects, but also those focused on agriculture and farming (which accounts for over 70% of our footprint) take time to yield results. Improvements in measurements also help to see emissions reductions start to come to life.

Achieving our 2020 emission reduction target a year early is the result of the collective effort to implement a number of projects all over the world. From avoiding deforestation, to reforestation and giving more support to transitioning towards more sustainable farming practices; there is no one solution or approach.

We’re committed to reduce virgin plastic use by around 27%, we want as many of our products as possible to be designed for recycling and we’ll be sourcing 50% of our ingredients from regenerative sources by 2030.

Of course, we can’t get complacent. We know that there is now a big drive to 2030. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, so we’ve got to look at how we drive the bigger step changes in emissions reductions, particularly in agriculture.

How are global events changing the strategy?

In recent years the only constant has been change, and we are continually adapting and evolving our strategy as we go. In many cases, it’s strengthened our resolve for many of the commitments we’ve made.

For example, the climate impacts currently hitting Western Africa are affecting the yields of cocoa plants, seeing them hit a record price high; more than we’ve seen in over six decades. That is obviously very challenging for businesses but when we look closely and what’s driving the price surge, among the factors at play is climate change linked weather conditions. This supports the case for the work we’ve been doing to drive regenerative agriculture in cocoa producing regions and ensure more resilience into the future.

Similarly, conflicts around the world have created supply chain challenges in terms of the availability of particular ingredients. Knowing we can work with trusted suppliers elsewhere in the world ensures we can get hold of the right ingredients to get food on shelves and have a resilient business model.

Challenges are continuing, and there will likely be more climate shocks. We’re yet to see the impact of the really wet summer we had last year on UK yields of wheat and other commodities. Conversely, farmers haven’t had much rainfall in the first quarter of 2025. Every year is uncertain, but it only serves to demonstrate why investing in sustainability is not only good for reducing emissions and supporting nature, but also to drive resilience in your business.

How are consumer demands changing the way Nestlé manufactures?

Every year we see an increase in the number of eco-actives – consumers who are saying they actively want to make purchasing decisions based on sustainability criteria. However, at the same time we know there are other factors impacting consumers, often leading to a say-do gap. What we do know is consumers still have a greater expectation on businesses than they do policy makers in terms of action. So, there’s a real role for us as a manufacturing sector to step up, act and drive change.

Consumers also have far greater access to data than they’ve ever had before, whether that be shopper assist apps which can be used to understand a company’s credentials, or external sustainability ratings. So it’s up to us to provide transparency.

At the same time, we know consumers are really savvy, engaged and are looking out for incidents of greenwashing. Therefore, we do a huge amount of work to make sure we’re communicating in a way that is honest, credible and evidence-based because we want to take consumers on the journey with us.

How is the business navigating supply chain challenges?

It’s important we consult the best available science and projects to help us understand and plan for what might face us. Through our Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) report we look globally at the risks and opportunities from both physical events e.g. changing weather patterns, and transitional events such as changes in policy.

So, what do we do about it? The first thing to note is that when you’re working in this sector, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The approach we take to support a more resilient cocoa supply chain in West Africa is completely different to that required for coffee grown in Vietnam or fresh milk produced in Scotland.

Therefore, we’ve got a broad range of activities and programmes in place to tackle this. In the UK, for example, we’ve worked with First Milk, a regenerative farming cooperative, for over 20 years and they supply all our fresh milk for our confectionery and frothy coffee products.

Over those two decades we have created a partnership of trust and an ability to truly engage and try new things. As such we were able to reduce our carbon footprint by 30% by the end of 2024 and by working with partners such as First Milk, it enables us to better navigate challenges and cost fluctuations in the market.

How is the company working with growers/farmers to enhance ecology and the environment?

We depend on nature and a balanced ecosystem so our partnerships within the supply chain are absolutely essential. Biodiversity and nature are metrics that are just as important to us as carbon. However, tracking the impact on nature is much more nascent and a common methodology doesn’t yet exist.

But by adopting holistic regenerative agricultural practices on farms and at landscape level, we are able to see the impacts for ourselves. And, it’s often the topic that farmers get most excited about.

They’re proud to share with us and with each other pictures of bird species that may have returned or what’s going on underneath the hedgerows they’ve planted.

The government have biodiversity and nature commitments to uphold to help protect 30% of the UK’s land and sea by 2030 and so we know nature is going to rise on the political agenda too.

So, that ecology piece is really important, and it’s only going to become more so as policy makers start to commit to nature restoration and we begin to see the real impacts that can come about if we don’t look after the environment.

How is your supply chain resilience linked to sustainability?

Sustainability, by its very definition, is about meeting the needs of a future planet without compromising the needs of today.

As well as trying to have as positive an impact as possible, we have a role to play in ensuring the business exists into the future. We want to ensure we can source the ingredients at the quality and quantity we need to produce the products we all know and love.

Being able to demonstrate how sustainability drives business resilience is really valuable to help channel more effort and resource to do more. It might be showing how a regenerative farmer is better able to withstand weather shocks or how a factory is less at risk of flooding or heat stress. Showing how resilience shows up in real terms is when you know you’ve hit a sweet spot in sustainability action.

Showing resilience within the business also creates those true light bulb moments; the real opportunities that help us get more investment into our different activities. That can be as simple as showing a farmer what we’ve been doing with regenerative agriculture practices, such as cover crops that will enable the farm to better withstand climate shocks.

That demonstrates what resilience looks like in real terms; where we can continue to get products on shelves because we can source ingredients at the quality and availability we need them.

How is technology influencing Nestlé’s sustainability strategy?

Technology is playing a role in everything we do; it’s helping us collect, analyse and synthesise data so that we can better streamline our reporting processes and disclosure. We operate in over 186 countries globally, so we have programmes all over the world collecting data. Being able to use it to report on our global emissions reductions pathway is incredibly complex, so the role of technology is key.

We’re also seeing the role it can play through the supply chain; whether it be providing new tools to different suppliers to help them understand their impact and how we can better collaborate, to the impact it can make on farms. We’re now in the era of digital farming, so we can use remote sensing to track how soil carbon is changing in real time, for example.

Part of our role is leveraging the power of tech to get people on board and make sure it’s right for the application. We don’t want to add burdens to already busy farmers. But by using technology, we can make their lives easier, collect more data and make better decisions to achieve better outcomes.

We’re still getting our heads around where AI could really support more actionable sustainability, but I have no doubt it will. So, I’m excited about how we can leverage the power of AI to go further and faster together on our sustainability objectives.

With climate change inextricably linked to agriculture, what does the future of production look like at Nestle?

The immediate future means doubling down on what we’ve been doing already. We have a number of projects and programmes that are starting to really deliver, so we’ve been given the business confidence that this is the right track.

We’ll be leaning in to those existing projects and looking to scale them wherever possible. We’ve been in a phase of test and learn – which we’ll still be doing a lot of going forward, particularity as new solutions and science comes to light.

We also need to continue to strengthen and build new partnerships and collaborations. No one company can do any of this alone. So, we need to work together, particularly in a challenging business context. Farmers need us and we need them, so it’s really important we support this vitalistic system together.

It’s also worth highlighting that while things are tough in the current business environment, sustainability isn’t a topic that can be parked. Results take a long time to come to fruition, so we need to be designing and implementing now, to see the impacts down the line.

I feel fortunate that sustainability has become part of Nestle’s DNA. That’s not to say we have all the answers but we’re making good progress and I’m confident that with continued energy, action and collaboration we can deliver on our commitments and ultimately deliver for people and planet.

We need to continue on that train; knowing that projects we start today might not deliver any benefits until 2028/2029. Everything we do today is really important for the commitments we’ve set in the future.