At Nestlé, everything we do starts with you, our consumer. Wherever you choose to shop, our goal is to delight and surprise you with products you’ll love – from reimagined classics to brand new product innovations.
To do this, we’re enhancing our capabilities and evolving our culture to help our people deliver innovative ideas. Our innovation model works across three key areas: driving innovation across key brands, building a culture of innovation, and finding new ways to reach consumers.
Driving Innovation Across Key Products
At Nestlé, we’re proud of the beloved brands in our portfolio that have driven our success. Change is happening more rapidly now than ever before, and we’re speeding up our innovation pipeline to address this. The first step in innovation is revisiting these iconic brands and experimenting with ways to make something our consumers already love even better and fit for the latest tastes.
Our brands are taking big steps forward. For example, our Starbucks Creamer and Coffee mate lines have introduced a range of plant-based options for those choosing alternatives to dairy. In other cases, classic brands are leading the charge in new spaces. DiGiorno recently introduced a first-of-its-kind Croissant Crust pizza, a part of a range of exciting innovations the brand is introducing to the frozen pizza aisle, and Stouffer’s surprised their fans with a popular new Mac and Cheese Bites option. Meanwhile our coffee brands – like Nescafé and Coffee mate natural bliss, are completely reimagining the world of coffee.
If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s that our brands will continue exploring new ideas and iterating new options to bring you something great.
Reimagining Food and Beverage
Building a Culture of Innovation
We believe people drive innovation, and in 2023 we’ve been named among Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators for the fourth year in a row, taking the top spot in the Food & Beverage category.
Empowering our employees to innovate is a crucial part of driving our continued success. Our people are helping us connect more closely with our consumers, and at Nestlé everyone is encouraged to think and act like entrepreneurs, to make decisions with speed, and take ownership of our future as a business.
Nestlé USA already has several programs designed to enhance this culture:
- Open Channel is an internal crowd-sourcing initiative that taps into the collective creativity of our employees, inviting them to submit product and innovation ideas in various business challenges. To date, 9000 employees have submitted ideas and we’ve successfully launched 23 products including Stouffer’s Mac and Cheese Bites and the Nestlé Toll House Brookie.
- Talent Marketplace, an idea that emerged from Open Channel, is an AI-powered platform that connects employees with opportunities across the business – giving managers the power to find talent from unexpected part of the business to drive evolution and employees opportunities for new experiences and career growth.
- Our new hybrid way of working for corporate employees combines a culture of dynamic collaborative work in our offices with the flexibility to work from home.
Our People Leading the Way
Finding New Ways to Reach Consumers
We want you to be able to find your favorite products, no matter where you love to shop. As many consumers embrace buying from digital platforms, we’re expanding our capabilities to include direct-to-consumer and digital sales models to meet your preference for convenience and ease.
Many of our brands – including Nespresso – have been selling products through direct-to-consumer platforms for many years. Now, we want to offer more products via e-commerce, social commerce, and shoppable content - with a goal to make 25% of our global sales through e-commerce by 2025.
Through partnerships with delivery services like GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash we’ve been experimenting with home delivery of much-beloved products like freshly baked Nestlé Toll House cookies – bringing them to our consumer’s doorsteps within 30 minutes of being ordered. We’re excited to continue experimenting and expanding in this space.