Nestlé in society Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2015

Nestlé in society:
Creating Shared Value
Nutrition, health
and wellness
Rural development
Water
Environmental
sustainability
Human rights
and compliance
Our
people
Indirect economic impacts G4-DMA
They are committed to performance and growing the
business, and are willing to change their practices if another
proves to be more successful. We will report on its progress in
future reports.
Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE)
RISE is a tool that uses 10 indicators (rated from ‘problematic’
to ‘good’) to assess and improve sustainability at a farm level.
Our sourcing staff analyse the data collected for strengths and
weaknesses, with scores given for the 10 indicators. Results
are then discussed, and possible interventions suggested,
in a personal meeting with the farmer and are used to design
broader programmes across the sourcing district.
With the increasing importance of agripreneurship, the RISE
tool will be systematically integrated into the development
approach. Conducted on farms representing farming system
clusters, the RISE tool makes sustainable agriculture
measurable, communicable and tangible. RISE is a means of
achieving a holistic farm system analysis and continuous
improvement. As such, it is not limited only to milk, but can
be applied across a large number of different animal and crop
production systems.
Investing in plant science to help farmers
Nestlé makes a significant investment each year in agricultural
R&D, and as part of our support for farmers, we share our
expertise and research findings. For instance, by developing
new varieties of crops, we can offer farmers more choice on
what they grow, as well as optimising production and building
a stronger foundation for the future. At the same time, we are
also helping them protect the environment.
Through our state-of-the-art network of agricultural R&D
centres, we invested EUR 11.2 million (CHF 13.5 million) in plant
science at our centre in Tours, France, and CHF 5 million at
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, during 2015. Our scientists looked at
issues such as genetic diversity and ways of delivering stronger,
more robust plants to farmers, as well as issues related to
productivity, crop quality and environmental protection.
Improving coffee production
in the Philippines
Nestlé understands that coffee farmers need better-quality
coffee plants to improve their income. In the Philippines, we
began introducing new plants in the 1980s. However, in recent
years this has rapidly accelerated thanks to the work of the
Nestlé R&D Centre at Tours, France.
The centre has developed a range of coffee varieties, with
trees being tested in the Philippines on experimental stations
and with farmers, in collaboration with the Department of
Agriculture. Ultimately, it is the farmers’ approval, combined
with Nestlé’s strict selection on physical and sensory
characteristics, that decides which varieties are propagated
on a large scale.
Ever since the first varieties were officially registered more
than five years ago, Nestlé has used its unique know-how to
propagate and distribute the millions of trees that are needed
to replant farms in the Philippines and increase national
production. We have combined traditional techniques, such as
grafting, with an innovative method of accelerated
propagation, called somatic embryogenesis, which R&D Tours
adapted for use on coffee and cocoa. This method utilises the
flexibility of plant cells to produce and multiply large numbers
of embryos from leaf tissue in a short period of time.
The embryos are produced in Tours, France, and germinated in
Nestlé nurseries in the Philippines. To date, more than 1.3 million
trees have been produced in this way. Soon, the propagation
technique will be available locally, as Nestlé will be training two
Filipino scientists in Tours in 2016, following similar support for
scientists from seven other countries in previous years.
Field trials and the importance
of farmers’ feedback
Field trials in Mexico and Thailand are placing coffee growers
at the heart of the development of new coffee varieties.
The Nescafé Plan aims to increase the profitability of coffee
farming by distributing more productive trees to farmers.
Developing new coffee varieties requires intensive research
into areas such as a tree’s yield and drought resistance.
Equally, farmers need to be aware of the consequences and
implications of introducing new varieties into their fields. In
2011, R&D Tours, along with Nestlé Mexico and Nestlé
Thailand, embarked on trials in collaboration with national
institutes to evaluate yield performance and farmers’
perceptions of new varieties.
We worked with farmers to identify their expectations of
the new plants, record their feedback, publish the results and
correlate these with the varieties’ yields. The trials highlighted
a real need to include field trials and farmer surveys in the
process of evaluating coffee varieties. We were able to identify
promising varieties with potential for release, and varieties
unsuitable for release, where there were strong discrepancies
between yield and the farmers’ acceptance. Strong regional
variations were also found.
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