Peter Brabeck-Letmathe

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe
Brabeck-Letmathe in 2010.
Born	1944-11-13November 13, 1944 (age 81) Villach, Austria
Nationality	Austrian
Citizenship	Austria
Education	Vienna University of Economics and Business (economics)
Alma mater	Vienna University of Economics and Business
Occupation	Business executive
Years active	1968–present
Employer	Nestlé S.A.
Company	Nestlé
Organization	Nestlé; Formula One Group; World Economic Forum
Title	Former chief executive officer (1997–2008) and chairman (2005–2017) of Nestlé
Predecessor	Helmut Maucher
Successor	Paul Bulcke (as chief executive) Paul Bulcke (as chairman)
Board member of	Credit Suisse L'Oréal ExxonMobil European Round Table of Industrialists
Known for	Reorienting Nestlé toward nutrition, health and wellness; remarks on the pricing of water
Salary	About CHF 14 million (2006)

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (born 13 November 1944) is an Austrian business executive who served as chief executive officer of Nestlé from 1997 to 2008 and as chairman of its board from 2005 to 2017, remaining chairman emeritus until April 2026. He led the world's largest food and beverage company for two decades, a tenure exceeded in length by few executives of comparable enterprises.

Brabeck-Letmathe joined Nestlé in 1968 as a salesman in Austria selling ice cream, and reached the chief executive's office 29 years later without having worked for another employer. The intervening career was spent almost entirely outside Switzerland: a decade in Chile from 1970, then managing directorships in Ecuador and Venezuela, before his transfer to the company's headquarters at Vevey in 1987. The pattern (long postings in developing markets, followed by a late arrival at head office) was characteristic of Nestlé's management model and shaped his subsequent strategy.

As chief executive he reoriented a company built on confectionery, coffee and prepared foods toward what he termed nutrition, health and wellness, arguing that demand in developed markets was shifting from convenience toward products with a health claim, and that a food manufacturer that did not make the transition would be left selling declining categories. He pursued the position through acquisition (Ralston Purina for US$10.3 billion in 2001, Dreyer's ice cream, the mineral water business San Pellegrino, Jenny Craig, Novartis Medical Nutrition, and Gerber for US$5.5 billion in 2007) and through the GLOBE programme, a company-wide standardization of business processes and information systems intended to make a highly decentralized group manageable as a whole. Nestlé's annual sales rose from roughly 72 billion Swiss francs in 1997 to more than 107 billion by 2008.

He is more widely known, outside the food industry, for remarks about water. Interviewed for the 2005 documentary We Feed the World, he described the view that water should be declared a public right as "extreme" and argued that water was "a foodstuff like any other" that should carry a market value. The passage circulated widely on social media from around 2013, and was generally presented as a claim that water is not a human right. Brabeck-Letmathe subsequently stated that he regarded water for drinking and basic hygiene as a human right, that his argument concerned overconsumption by the water-rich rather than access for the water-poor, and that the documentary had removed his remarks from their context. The episode remains the single most widely circulated statement associated with any Nestlé executive.

He has also chaired the Formula One Group and served on the boards of Credit Suisse, L'Oréal and ExxonMobil. In 2025 he was appointed interim chairman of the World Economic Forum following the resignation of Klaus Schwab, and stepped down later the same year, citing a toxic working environment.

Background: Nestlé before Brabeck

The company Brabeck-Letmathe joined in 1968 and led thirty years later had characteristics that determined much of what he could and could not do, and a reputational history that framed how his own statements were received.

Origins

Nestlé's origins lie in two separate Swiss enterprises of the 1860s. Henri Nestlé, a German-born pharmacist working in Vevey, developed in 1867 a substitute for breast milk combining cow's milk, wheat flour and sugar, marketed as Farine Lactée and intended for infants who could not be breastfed. In the same decade the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company was established at Cham by the American brothers Charles and George Page. The two competed and merged in 1905.

The company grew through the twentieth century by acquisition and by international expansion, adding Maggi in 1947, Findus, Libby's, Stouffer's, Carnation in 1985, Rowntree Mackintosh in 1988 and Perrier in 1992. Nescafé, developed in the 1930s and adopted at scale by the United States military during the Second World War, became one of the most widely distributed consumer products in the world.

The infant formula controversy

The episode with the longest consequences for Nestlé's reputation began in the 1970s and concerned the same product category the company had been founded on.

Campaigners, beginning with the 1974 pamphlet The Baby Killer published by War on Want and its German translation Nestlé tötet Babys, alleged that the marketing of infant formula in developing countries discouraged breastfeeding and led to infant deaths where mothers lacked clean water to make up the formula, or diluted it to make it last. A boycott of Nestlé products was organized in the United States in 1977 and spread internationally.

The World Health Organization adopted the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 1981, which restricted the promotion of formula. Nestlé accepted the code in 1984 and the boycott was suspended, then resumed in 1988 over alleged breaches, and has continued in some form since. The company maintains that it complies with the code; campaigning organizations, principally the International Baby Food Action Network, contest this.

The dispute is the oldest continuous consumer boycott of a multinational company, and it established a pattern that recurred throughout Brabeck-Letmathe's tenure: Nestlé's size and the intimacy of its product categories (infant food, water, milk) made it a standing target in a way that manufacturers of less essential goods were not.

The Maucher era

Brabeck-Letmathe's immediate predecessor, Helmut Maucher, led Nestlé from 1981 to 1997 as chief executive and remained chairman until 2000. Maucher, a German who had likewise spent his entire career at the company, pursued expansion through large acquisitions (Carnation, Rowntree, Perrier, Buitoni) and made Nestlé decisively the largest food company in the world.

Maucher's Nestlé was also extremely decentralized. National markets were run with substantial autonomy by managers who understood local conditions, a model appropriate to a company selling perishable products in nearly every country on earth, and one Nestlé had followed since the nineteenth century. The cost was that the group had limited visibility into its own operations: purchasing, systems, product specifications and data definitions differed between countries, and a decision taken at Vevey could not reliably be executed everywhere.

Resolving that tension without destroying the local knowledge that produced it was the central administrative problem Brabeck-Letmathe inherited.

The food industry in the 1990s

Two shifts in the developed-market food industry framed his strategy.

The first was retailer consolidation. The rise of a small number of very large grocery chains (Walmart in the United States, Tesco in Britain, Carrefour in France, the German discounters) moved bargaining power from manufacturers to retailers. A manufacturer facing a customer that accounted for a substantial share of its sales, and that operated its own competing private-label products, had less ability to raise prices.

The second was the beginning of a shift in consumer demand. Growth in the classic packaged-food categories (confectionery, prepared meals, sweetened drinks) slowed in wealthy countries as public attention turned to obesity, sugar and processed food. Categories with a health or nutritional claim, by contrast, grew and supported higher margins.

Brabeck-Letmathe's strategic argument followed from the combination: a food manufacturer squeezed by retailers in stagnant categories had to move into categories where the product's value was less easily replicated by a private label, and nutritional and health properties were the most defensible basis for doing so.

Early life and education

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe was born on 13 November 1944 in Villach, in Carinthia, then part of Nazi-annexed Austria, into a Catholic family whose origins lay in Iserlohn-Letmathe in north-western Germany, the source of the second element of the surname.

He studied economics at the University of World Trade in Vienna, now the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

He was a competitive skier in his youth and remained a mountaineer throughout his life, a preoccupation he referred to frequently in his public speaking and used as a source of management metaphor.

Career at Nestlé

Austria and Latin America

Brabeck-Letmathe joined Nestlé in Austria in 1968 as a salesman, initially selling ice cream, and moved into work on new products.

In 1970 he was posted to Chile, where he remained for almost a decade, first as national sales manager and later as director of marketing. The posting covered the presidency of Salvador Allende, the 1973 coup and the early years of the military government, a period of nationalizations, price controls, hyperinflation and then abrupt liberalization. Managing a consumer goods business through it required improvisation of a kind unavailable in a stable market, and Brabeck-Letmathe later identified the Latin American years as the formative part of his commercial education.

He was appointed managing director of Nestlé Ecuador in 1981 and president and managing director of Nestlé Venezuela in 1983.

Vevey

In October 1987, after seventeen years in Latin America, he was transferred to Nestlé's international headquarters at Vevey as senior vice-president responsible worldwide for the Culinary Products Division.

On 1 January 1992 he was appointed executive vice-president of Nestlé S.A. with global responsibility for a strategic business group covering prepared foods, Buitoni pasta, chocolate and confectionery, ice cream, pet food and industrial products, together with worldwide responsibility for marketing, communications and public affairs.

The most consequential work of this period was the reconstruction of Nestlé's brand architecture. The company had accumulated, through a century of acquisition and decentralized local management, several thousand brands, many of them confined to a single country and several of them competing with one another. Brabeck-Letmathe imposed a hierarchy: a small number of strategic brands managed globally, a second tier managed regionally, and local brands retained only where they held a defensible position. Nestlé, Nescafé, Nespresso, Maggi, Buitoni and Purina were designated as global corporate or strategic brands, with marketing standards set centrally.

The exercise established him as the internal candidate for the succession, and the discipline it imposed, global standards applied to a decentralized organization, is the same principle he later applied to systems and processes through the GLOBE programme.

Appointment as chief executive

Brabeck-Letmathe was elected to the board of directors and appointed chief executive officer of Nestlé S.A. on 5 June 1997, succeeding Helmut Maucher. He was elected vice-chairman on 6 April 2001 and chairman of the board in April 2005, holding both roles until the chief executive's position passed to Paul Bulcke in 2008.

Chief executive of Nestlé, 1997–2008

Nutrition, health and wellness

The strategic reorientation Brabeck-Letmathe announced was summarized in a phrase that became the company's stated purpose: that Nestlé would move from being a food and beverage company to a nutrition, health and wellness company.

The argument had three parts. Growth in the traditional packaged food categories was slowing in the markets that generated most of Nestlé's profit. Retailer consolidation was eroding manufacturer margins in exactly those categories, because a private-label chocolate bar or frozen meal is straightforward to produce. And products whose value rested on a nutritional or health property were harder to copy, commanded a premium, and were growing.

The reorientation was pursued along several lines simultaneously: reformulation of existing products to reduce salt, sugar and fat; investment in research, including the Nestlé Research Centre at Lausanne, one of the larger private nutrition research operations in the world; the development of premium categories with defensible positions, of which Nespresso became the most successful; and acquisition into nutrition, water, pet care and, latterly, the boundary between food and pharmaceuticals.

Critics questioned the substance of the repositioning throughout. Nestlé remained, through and after the period, one of the world's largest sellers of confectionery, ice cream, sweetened drinks and instant coffee, and campaigners argued that a company deriving a large share of revenue from those categories could not meaningfully describe itself as a nutrition and health business. Brabeck-Letmathe's response was that reformulating products people actually eat improves public health more than withdrawing from the categories and leaving them to others, and that the transition was a direction of travel rather than a completed state.

Acquisitions

The strategy was executed principally through purchase, and Brabeck-Letmathe's tenure was among the most acquisitive in Nestlé's history.

The largest transaction was the acquisition of Ralston Purina for approximately US$10.3 billion, agreed in 2001 and completed in December of that year. Combined with Nestlé's existing Friskies business, it made the company the largest pet food manufacturer in the world. The logic was that pet care behaves commercially like premium human nutrition (owners buy on perceived health benefit rather than on price, private-label competition is weaker, and the category grows with household affluence) while being insulated from the criticism directed at human food.

Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream was acquired in stages from 2002, making Nestlé the largest ice cream company in the world. Perrier had been acquired under Maucher in 1992; Brabeck-Letmathe added the Italian mineral water business San Pellegrino, and built Nestlé Waters into the largest bottled water business in the world.

Movenpick, Powwow and a series of regional water brands followed. Jenny Craig, the weight management business, was acquired in 2006, and Novartis Medical Nutrition, which supplied clinical nutrition products to hospitals, in 2007. Gerber, the American baby food business, was acquired from Novartis in 2007 for US$5.5 billion, restoring Nestlé to a leading position in a category it had been founded on and had partly ceded.

The pattern is consistent: each purchase moved the company toward products bought for a nutritional or medical reason rather than for taste or convenience, and away from the commoditized centre of the grocery aisle.

Divestment and the financial stakes

Brabeck-Letmathe also reduced Nestlé's exposure outside food. The company had accumulated substantial minority holdings, of which the largest were in the eye care company Alcon and in the cosmetics group L'Oréal.

Alcon was floated in 2002, with Nestlé retaining a majority that it sold down over the following decade; the disposal to Novartis, completed after Brabeck-Letmathe's period as chief executive, realized a very large gain. The L'Oréal holding, dating from a 1974 arrangement with the Bettencourt family, was reduced in stages over subsequent years.

The GLOBE programme

The administrative counterpart to the strategy was GLOBE, Global Business Excellence, a programme launched in 2000 to standardize Nestlé's business processes, master data and information systems worldwide on a common platform.

Its objective was to make a company operating in almost every country, through subsidiaries with a century of local autonomy, legible and manageable as a single enterprise: to define a product, a customer and a supplier the same way everywhere, so that purchasing could be aggregated, best practice transferred and performance compared.

The programme was among the largest business systems implementations attempted by any company, ran for most of the decade, cost a reported figure in the billions of Swiss francs, and encountered the resistance such programmes generally do, particularly from national managers who regarded standardization as the imposition of Vevey's judgment over local knowledge. Brabeck-Letmathe defended it as the precondition for everything else, on the argument that a group that could not measure itself consistently could not be steered.

Assessments of GLOBE vary. Its supporters credit it with the procurement savings, supply chain efficiency and comparability of performance that underpinned Nestlé's margin improvement through the 2000s. Its critics regard it as having cost more and delivered later than promised, and as having eroded some of the local responsiveness that was Nestlé's historic advantage. Nestlé Continuous Excellence, a lean manufacturing programme, was layered on top of it later in the decade.

Financial performance

Nestlé's annual sales rose from approximately 72 billion Swiss francs in 1997 to more than 107 billion by 2008. Margins improved over the same period, achieved chiefly through cost reduction in manufacturing and procurement rather than through workforce reduction, an approach Brabeck-Letmathe emphasized publicly and contrasted with the restructuring practices then common in American industry.

The period was not uniformly favourable. Global food commodity prices, which had fallen through the late 1990s, rose sharply from 2006, compressing margins across the industry, and the strength of the Swiss franc reduced the value of foreign earnings when translated into the reporting currency, a structural difficulty for a Swiss-domiciled company earning almost all its revenue abroad.

Succession

Brabeck-Letmathe stepped down as chief executive in April 2008 and was succeeded by Paul Bulcke, a Belgian who had likewise spent his entire career at Nestlé, including extensive service in Latin America. Brabeck-Letmathe remained chairman.

The arrangement, a former chief executive continuing as chairman over his own successor, is discouraged under most corporate governance codes, and drew criticism from Swiss and international investors on that ground. It is common in Swiss practice and had precedent at Nestlé, where Maucher had done the same. Brabeck-Letmathe held the chairmanship until 2017, when Bulcke in turn succeeded him in it; Bulcke was in turn succeeded by Pablo Isla in October 2025.

Chairman, 2005–2017

As chairman, Brabeck-Letmathe continued to shape strategy while Bulcke ran the operations.

The most substantial initiative of the period was the establishment in 2011 of Nestlé Health Science and the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, with an initial commitment reported at around 500 million Swiss francs, directed at the territory between food and pharmaceuticals: medical nutrition, products for specific conditions, and the science of personalized nutrition. The venture was the furthest expression of the nutrition, health and wellness argument: an attempt to build a business whose products would be prescribed or clinically recommended rather than chosen in a supermarket.

Nestlé also acquired the dermatology business Galderma outright and, later, made substantial purchases in coffee, including a perpetual licence to market Starbucks packaged products.

He published Nestlé: 150 Years of Nutrition, Health and Wellness in 2016 to mark the company's anniversary, and remained chairman emeritus after 2017, a position he held until April 2026.

Water

Water occupied a larger place in Brabeck-Letmathe's public life than any other subject, in two distinct senses: Nestlé built the largest bottled water business in the world under his leadership, and his statements about the pricing of water became the most widely circulated remarks ever made by a Nestlé executive.

The 2005 documentary

Interviewed for Erwin Wagenhofer's 2005 documentary We Feed the World, and credited as Peter Brabeck, he said:

"It's a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That's an extreme solution."

He continued that the other view holds water to be "a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value", and added: "Personally, I believe it's better to give a foodstuff a value so that we're all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water."

Circulation and response

The passage attracted limited attention on release and circulated very widely from around 2013, when the clip was extracted and shared on social media. In that form it was generally presented as a statement that water is not a human right, and it became one of the most shared pieces of corporate video of the period.

Brabeck-Letmathe responded that he regarded water for drinking and basic hygiene as a human right, that he had said so repeatedly elsewhere, and that his argument concerned a different question: that the 98.5 percent of fresh water used for purposes other than drinking and hygiene (overwhelmingly agriculture, and particularly irrigation of low-value crops and biofuel feedstock) is priced at or near zero in most jurisdictions, and that zero pricing guarantees waste. He argued that pricing that portion, while guaranteeing a free basic allocation for personal use, was the only mechanism that would reduce consumption in the places where consumption actually occurs.

He also said the documentary had removed the remarks from a longer exchange in which he made the distinction explicit.

The underlying position (free water for personal use, priced water for industrial and agricultural use) is a conventional one in water economics and is held by a range of development organizations. The controversy has persisted nonetheless, both because the clip is more memorable than the clarification and because the speaker was the chairman of a company that extracts groundwater at low cost and sells it at a substantial multiple.

Nestlé Waters

Nestlé built the largest bottled water business in the world during Brabeck-Letmathe's tenure, holding Perrier, Vittel, Contrex, San Pellegrino, Poland Spring, Pure Life and a large number of regional brands.

The business attracted sustained local opposition in several jurisdictions. Extraction from the Sanctuary Spring in Mecosta County, Michigan, was litigated for years; the company's operations in the drought-affected Californian San Bernardino National Forest, conducted under a long-expired permit, drew federal scrutiny; a plant at Bhati Dilwan in Pakistan was the subject of allegations that extraction had lowered the water table available to the surrounding village; and communities in Ontario, Maine, France and elsewhere contested permits and rates.

The recurring objection was not usually that the extraction was illegal but that the fees paid for groundwater were negligible relative to the value of the product sold, which returned the argument to precisely the pricing question Brabeck-Letmathe had raised in the documentary, with the roles of the parties inverted.

Nestlé sold the majority of its North American bottled water brands in 2021, after his retirement.

Other controversies

Infant formula

The boycott over the marketing of breast-milk substitutes, which began in 1977, continued throughout Brabeck-Letmathe's tenure. Nestlé's position was that it complied with the World Health Organization's International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and applied its own policy more strictly than national law required in many countries; campaigning organizations, principally the International Baby Food Action Network and Baby Milk Action, documented what they described as continuing breaches.

The dispute was never resolved during his leadership and has not been since. Its persistence over five decades has made it a standing feature of Nestlé's public position rather than an episode.

Cocoa and child labour

Nestlé, along with the other major chocolate manufacturers, was the subject of sustained criticism over the use of child labour and forced labour on cocoa farms in West Africa, from which the industry draws the majority of its supply.

The Harkin–Engel Protocol, a voluntary agreement signed by the industry in 2001, set targets for eliminating the worst forms of child labour that were repeatedly missed and postponed. Litigation was brought in United States courts by former child labourers, culminating in a Supreme Court ruling in 2021 that the claims could not proceed against the American parent companies on the facts pleaded.

Nestlé established the Nestlé Cocoa Plan in 2009 and became one of the first major manufacturers to commission and publish an independent assessment of child labour in its own supply chain, through the Fair Labor Association in 2012, an unusual step that acknowledged the problem in terms the industry had generally avoided. Critics noted that transparency is not remediation and that the underlying cause, the price paid to farmers, was unaddressed.

Palm oil

In 2010 Greenpeace ran a campaign against Nestlé's use of palm oil sourced from suppliers linked to deforestation in Indonesia, centred on a video parodying the Kit Kat advertising slogan. Nestlé's initial response was to have the video removed from YouTube on copyright grounds, which accelerated its circulation and produced a substantial volume of hostile comment on the company's own social media channels.

The episode is widely taught as a case study in corporate communications, and Nestlé's eventual response (suspending the implicated supplier, joining The Forest Trust and adopting a responsible sourcing commitment) is generally treated as a more effective model than the initial attempt at suppression.

Bottled water and plastics

Nestlé was repeatedly identified in waste audits as among the largest contributors to plastic packaging waste worldwide, a criticism that followed directly from the scale of the bottled water business built during Brabeck-Letmathe's tenure.

Other positions

Formula One

Brabeck-Letmathe served as chairman of the Formula One Group from 2016, following the acquisition of the sport's commercial rights by Liberty Media, until 2020. The appointment placed him at the head of a business entirely unlike the one he had spent his career in, and reflected Liberty's wish for an experienced chairman of global consumer businesses while Chase Carey ran operations and, subsequently, Stefano Domenicali took over.

Corporate boards

He served on the boards of Credit Suisse, where he was vice-chairman, of L'Oréal, reflecting Nestlé's shareholding, and of ExxonMobil. He was a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists.

World Economic Forum

Brabeck-Letmathe was a long-standing member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, and following the resignation of its founder Klaus Schwab as chairman in April 2025 he was appointed interim chairman.

He stepped down later in 2025, citing a toxic working environment. The Forum was at the time conducting an internal investigation into allegations concerning Schwab's conduct and the organization's governance, and Brabeck-Letmathe's departure was reported as reflecting the difficulty of stabilizing an institution built around a single founder over five decades.

Management philosophy

Long horizons

Brabeck-Letmathe's most consistent public argument concerned time. He held that food is a business of decades: that brands take generations to build, that agricultural supply chains cannot be reconfigured in a quarter, and that a company operating on those horizons is damaged by management to a quarterly reporting cycle.

He was accordingly critical of what he described as short-termism in capital markets, opposed the practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance, and resisted pressure to break up Nestlé into more focused businesses. His term for the disposition he sought was that Nestlé should be run as though it were owned by a family that intended to hold it indefinitely.

Decentralization within a framework

The organizational principle he pursued was that decisions about products, pricing and marketing execution should be taken close to the consumer, within standards set centrally. GLOBE was the instrument: common data, systems and processes were intended to make local autonomy safe by making it visible, rather than to eliminate it.

He described the model as centralizing what the consumer does not see and decentralizing what the consumer does.

Growth over acquisition accounting

Brabeck-Letmathe promoted a measure he termed the Nestlé Model: organic growth of 5 to 6 percent a year combined with continuous improvement in margin, achieved through internal performance rather than through acquisition. Acquisitions, in his framing, were for entering categories the company could not build into, not for producing growth figures.

Nutrition as strategy rather than philanthropy

He consistently argued that the health repositioning was commercial rather than charitable; that a food company facing declining categories and powerful retailers had no alternative, and that framing it as corporate responsibility both misdescribed the motive and made it less durable. He extended the argument to shared value, the framework developed by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, which Nestlé adopted formally: that a company's social contribution should arise from its business rather than from redistribution of its profits.

Climbing

A lifelong mountaineer, Brabeck-Letmathe used climbing as his standing management metaphor, and the wall of his office at Vevey carried a photograph of a summit. The recurring elements (that the route matters more than the peak, that speed is dangerous, that a party moves at the pace of its slowest member) map closely onto the positions he argued in business.

Compensation

Brabeck-Letmathe's earnings in 2006 were approximately 14 million Swiss francs, then about 9 million euro, which made him among the highest-paid executives in Switzerland and attracted comment in a country where executive pay was a live political question. Swiss voters approved the Minder initiative on executive remuneration in 2013, giving shareholders a binding vote on pay; Nestlé's disclosure practices were among those the campaign cited.

Personal life

Brabeck-Letmathe is married and has three children. He holds Austrian citizenship and has lived in Switzerland since 1987.

He is a mountaineer and skier, and has spoken of climbing as the activity through which he thinks about problems. He was appointed to honorary positions by several universities and holds honorary doctorates.

Publications

• Business in a Changing Society (2014) ISBN 978-303810012-6
• Nutrition for a Better Life (2016) ISBN 978-359343437-7
• Nestlé: 150 Years of Nutrition, Health and Wellness, 1866–2016 (2016) ISBN 978-2812314117

Assessment

Brabeck-Letmathe's tenure is assessed differently depending on which of two questions is asked.

On the commercial question, the record is strong. Sales rose from roughly 72 billion Swiss francs to more than 107 billion, margins improved, the company entered pet care, water, medical nutrition and premium coffee at scale, and it emerged from his period as chief executive holding leading global positions in more categories than any competitor. The GLOBE programme, whatever its cost and delays, gave a group of Nestlé's dispersion a common operating spine that it had lacked for a century. Nespresso, developed and scaled during his leadership, became one of the most profitable consumer businesses in Europe.

On the question of what the company became, assessments are more divided. The nutrition, health and wellness framing was advanced for two decades by a business that remained among the world's largest sellers of confectionery, ice cream and sweetened beverages, and critics have argued that the repositioning was more successful as a description than as a transformation. The water business grew into the largest in the world while its chairman argued publicly for the pricing of water, a juxtaposition that supplied his critics with their most effective material regardless of the merits of his actual position.

A third assessment concerns the model of leadership itself. Brabeck-Letmathe spent 29 years reaching the chief executive's office and a further two decades in the two senior positions, never having worked for another employer, and combined the chairmanship with the chief executive's role for three years and held the chairmanship over his own successor for nine. Supporters regard this as the source of the long-horizon management he advocated; critics regard it as a concentration of authority that Swiss governance permitted and that few other jurisdictions would.

See also

• Nestlé
• Paul Bulcke
• Pablo Isla
• Klaus Schwab
• Emmanuel Faber

External links

• Nestlé
• Personal website