Milk chocolate needed a baby food maker's trick to stop going mouldy
In the late 1860s the chocolatier Daniel Peter had a problem. Milk added to chocolate left water behind, and the bars grew mildew. Henri Nestle, busy selling milk-based baby food from Vevey, knew how to strip the water out. After years of work Peter cracked milk chocolate, and in 1879 he joined forces with Nestle.
Today's Nestle traces back to two rival Swiss firms. In 1866 Charles and George Page, brothers from Illinois, founded the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in Cham; Charles was the American consul to Switzerland. A year later Henri Nestle launched his infant food. Each soon muscled into the other's territory, Anglo-Swiss adding baby foods in 1877 and Nestle adding condensed milk the next year, until they merged in 1905. Swiss chocolate families Peter, Kohler and Cailler combined over the following decades and joined the group in 1929.
The First World War brought government contracts for dairy products and more than doubled output, but demand collapsed afterward when consumers went back to fresh milk. Chocolate became the second pillar in the 1920s, and white chocolate followed in the 1930s as the Milkybar. Nescafe, launched during the Second World War, became a staple for American troops.
Growth after 1945 came through a long string of purchases: Maggi in 1947, Carnation in 1984, and Rowntree Mackintosh in 1988, bringing Kit Kat, Smarties and Aero. Gerber baby food followed in 2007 for 5.5 billion dollars. The company also became a major shareholder in the cosmetics giant L'Oreal. Headquartered in Vevey, it has topped the world's publicly listed food companies since 2014, and as of 2025 ran 335 factories across 185 countries with around 271,000 staff. Twenty-nine of its brands each sell over a billion Swiss francs a year.
Its record has drawn heavy criticism. Promotion of infant formula in developing countries, accused of discouraging breastfeeding, led to a boycott in the 1970s. Nestle has also faced scrutiny over child labour and deforestation in West African cocoa, price fixing, water extraction and plastic waste. Since 2010 it has tried to recast itself as a nutrition and health company.
Source: Nestlé
