Nestlé announced on Wednesday three new company initiatives aimed at creating new partnerships with governments, NGOs and small enterprises. The announcement comes as Nestlé launches a two-day forum on Creating Shared Value in New York in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Partnerships and the Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations. The initiatives include an expanded education program focused on nutrition, health and wellness for school age children around the world, a research and development centre in Africa, and a new Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value, awarded every other year to foster innovative approaches to solve problems of nutrition, water and rural development. These new initiatives in nutrition, water, and rural development come against a backdrop of a deep economic recession, with destruction of value for both shareholders and the public of historic proportions. According to Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, “the financial crisis which has resulted in the current deep recession revealed once more a basic business axiom: if you fail to work on behalf of the public interest and take shortcuts that place the public at risk, you will also fail your shareholders. We believe that to have long-term business success you must simultaneously create value for shareholders and for the public. At Nestlé, we call this creating shared value, and it is the fundamental principle behind the way we conduct business at Nestlé.”
