“During the last few years Nestlé has witnessed the collapse of Zimbabwe’s dairy industry. Nestlé prefers to work within contractual agreements to ensure a constant supply of fresh milk, but at the end of 2008, the company found itself operating in a market where 8 of its 16 contractual suppliers had gone out of business.

In light of our long-term commitment to Zimbabwe, we bought this milk on a temporary basis. This helped prevent a further deterioration in food supplies in Zimbabwe at that time.” – Nestlé Media Center

Corporate Social Responsibility is often initiated retroactively, as a means to manage a corporate crisis. Such campaigns can be as vast as a sweeping advertorial exercise, or as simple as a mere press release. Such is unfortunately the case with Nestlé’s operations in Zimbabwe. The continuous supply of consistently high quality fresh milk was crucial to the company’s prolonged activity in the nation of Zimbabwe, and in their desperation to continue as a major employer to Zimbabweans, they went beyond the moral border. One certainly can forgive, but to utilize the farms of Mrs. Mugabe , the travesty now referred to as the ‘Blood Milk’ scandal, will not be forgotten. For this is perhaps the most blatant, (blatant only in its ostentatiousness)  case of corporate social irresponsibility witnessed in Zimbabwe in decades.

In early 2009, Nestlé was ‘forced‘ to purchase milk on the open market from a wide variety of suppliers on a non-contractual basis. This includes milk from the Gushungo Dairy Estate which today accounts for between 10 and 15% of Nestlé’s local milk supply.  These are conservative estimates and one can certainly admire the nobility of their press release and the transparency implicated in how easy this circumstance was to investigate. However, business is business for Nestle, they weren’t giving the milk away to Zimbabweans that couldn’t afford it. They were profiting on the back of one of the major catalysts to Zimbabwe’s deterioration.

To Nestlé- your response was ‘Quik’, but not to be forgiven lightly.