By chance, really?

When someone asks me why I decided to join Nestlé some twelve years ago as a human rights expert, my answer is always the same: "By chance, really...". At the time I was looking for a job in my home country, Switzerland, after having spent four fantastic years in Washington, DC with IFC but away from the woman I loved.

I got interested in Nestlé because they were looking for someone with my profile to develop their human rights strategy, based where I wanted to live. This looked like a good match-up and a wonderful opportunity to see what the business & human rights agenda looks like from within a multinational company.

If I joined Nestlé by chance back then, it is no coincidence that I have stayed with the company for more than twelve years.

Never before have I worked for an organization with such an impact on that many people, starting with the +6 million farmers who grow raw materials, to the +200,000 employees who transform them into the +1 billion food & beverages products that consumers buy every single day.

"With big business comes big responsibilities" some say. This is basically what drove the thinking behind our first Human Rights Due Diligence Program that we launched just a few months after I joined the company: We wanted to be strategic in our way to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights that had been adopted by the UN Human Rights Council earlier that year through our entire value chain.

The first five years of my assignment mainly consisted in carrying our human rights impact assessments in priority countries. These allowed me to meet outstanding - yet often vulnerable - people from coffee farmers in Colombia and Myanmar to dairy producers in Pakistan, supply chain workers in China and local community members in Angola among many others.

From this on-the-ground experience we have worked tirelessly to embed human rights throughout our business activities. I will not try to summarize here everything we have done as part of this work. We have told our story multiple times through reports, articles and conferences, always with the aim to share with others our progress and the many challenges met along the way. Some of the key milestones include:

And yet there is still so much more work to be done.

Today we are launching dedicated actions plans to address our salient human rights issues. These action plans, approved by our Executive Board, put our Human Rights Framework and Roadmap into practice. They help us enhance our level of human rights due diligence throughout our value chain and across priority countries. They articulate our strategy for embedding, assessing, addressing and reporting on each salient issue, defining what we need to do across our business activities, as well as what collective action can be taken. They harness Nestlé’s strengths and capacities that we have developed over the last years, with those of our value chain partners, and our external partners and stakeholders.

With collaboration built into each action plan, we hope to spark new engagement and inspire collective action with peers, business partners, civil society, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments. This way, we can work together to tackle the root causes of our salient issues and create positive impact at scale. We want these action plans to be dynamic and reflect the evolution of stakeholders’ expectations and of the contexts in which we operate.

Some of the flagship programs we have launched recently and we will leverage to implement these action plans include:

• Our Living Wage Program helping us ensure that all our employees worldwide, including temporary workers, earn a living wage.
• Our Income Accelerator Program aiming to address the issue of child labor by rewarding cocoa farmers for the environmental and social benefits they provide to local community and society at large.
• The Nescafé Plan 2030?aiming to?accelerate our work with coffee farmers to help them transition to regenerative agriculture and improve their livelihoods.
• Our Forest Positive Strategy?focusing on small-scale farmers to help conserve and restore the world’s forests and natural ecosystems while promoting sustainable livelihoods and respecting human rights.

Our commitment to respecting and promoting human rights is a key part of our ambition to advance a regenerative food system at scale, which is focused on transforming farming practices at the heart of the food system while enabling a just and equitable transition. Our salient human rights issue action plans will help us get there.

We cannot ensure a just transition toward a regenerative food system without putting people and human rights at the center, Mark Schneider, Nestlé CEO.

The release of these action plans comes with the set up of a strengthened governance structure within Nestlé and the creation of a dedicated Human Rights Steering Committee. It will reinforce the the great work we have done in the last years as part of our Human Rights Community and take it to another level.

This is a major milestone on our human rights journey and I am as excited as ever to take on the new challenges that will inevitably arise during the implementation phase of these plans. I am also delighted to play an enhanced (vs. new) role as Global Head of Social Impact and Human Rights to lead and coordinate all the work needed across the entire company to make a difference for all the people we work with day in and day out.

Sometimes chance can be a good thing...