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Nestlé blames sustainability slowdown on Trump

Nestlé is not as vocal as it could be about its sustainability programmes– in part due to US president Trump’s opposition to tackling climate change, Nestlé CEO has said.

At an event for Nestlé employees in December, chief executive Philipp Navratil said “it’s a bit [of] a pity” that the world’s largest food company is not more vocal on sustainability issues.

He took some of the blame for this but also reportedly said it was “also President [Donald] Trump’s fault”, according to video footage of the event seen by the Financial Times.

“If you think about it in hindsight, five years ago or three years ago, if you go and meet investors you would get plenty of questions about sustainability,” said Navratil. “Somehow in the US it has totally gone off the agenda. In all of the investor meetings I have done, nobody asks, not one has asked – I think one maybe – about sustainability.”

While topics like net-zero and nature protection remain a key focus for major food and beverage companies – but the narrative seems to have changed.

“We see a massive shift in how the food and ingredients sector approaches sustainability,” explained Monika Radomska, ESG manager at EcoBean, a deep tech circular economy company that turns spent coffee beans into bio-based ingredients like antioxidants and protein additives for sectors including food, beverages, packaging and beauty.

“Reporting and net-zero targets are becoming less important. The new priorities are resilience and financials,” she added.

Others provided similar assessments of how talk of sustainability had shifted in recent months as the impact of climate change, geopolitics and the cost of living crisis all made resilience rather than responsibility the priority.

Change of priorities? ‘Sustainability doesn’t pay; secure supplies do’

Mathilde Pinon works for 21st.BIO, a Danish biotech company developing precision fermentation technology to produce milk proteins and similar ingredients, licensing it to companies in the food and nutrition industry.

Pinon said that when the company was formed in 2020 sustainability was “the number one reason” for companies to use such technology. The potential reduction in carbon emissions, which are high in relation to dairy, meat and other livestock proteins, was key to interest, investment, and innovation.

But in all honesty, she explained, their partners – foodtech startups, global food ingredients manufacturers, and dairy companies – “don’t care much for sustainability because it doesn’t pay. What is top of mind at the moment is security,” she added, and “security of supply in all regions of the world”.

Stockpiling brings sustainability to the fore for food companies

That countries have begun to stockpile foods again will not have escaped the notice of major food brands.

“From Sweden and Norway to India and Indonesia, states are holding back increasing quantities of rice, wheat and other staples as insurance against a world they increasingly view as unstable,” reported the Financial Times in January 2026. And, according to the World Bank’s April 2025 review of strategic grain reserves, climate-driven volatility is now one of the fastest-growing triggers of state intervention.

Food companies must react to secure resilient supply chains, reduce reliance on imports and, importantly, ensure complementary production. And all at cost parity.

Minon explained: “There are no green premiums for sustainable options these days. But if you can supply the same ingredients – that is with the same functionalities, taste and with no (or very little) reformation needed – and at the same price, then companies are happy to pick the sustainable alternative … but it’s never the key factor unfortunately.”

Investors are also asking slightly different questions of food companies, as Ana Maksimovic, an advisor to EU food and beverage brands on sustainability, noted recently.

“Fixed price contracts assume predictable harvests [but] investors know these assumptions are dead. They are calculating whether your procurement strategy services 40 degree summers.”

Maksimovic said on a recent investor call the “usual suspects” like science-based goals and 2030 targets were skimmed over, with the focus on water stress maps and how to price climate volatility.

“You can’t impress investors [with] ambition anymore. They're looking for evidence you understand what's coming,“ she explained.

Extreme weather events will continue

Extreme weather has flattened harvests, commodity prices have soared, islands have shrunk. The Global Tipping Points Report 2025, released in October, found that Earth has reached the first of several climate-related tipping points.

The first step is understanding the problem, noted the Boston Consulting Group and Quantis in an analysis showing that production levels worldwide could decline up to 35% across staple and non-staple crops by 2050.

For most of the world’s staple (bananas, maize, potatoes, rice, soybeans, sugar beet, sugarcane, wheat) and non-staple (cocoa, coffee, cotton, groundnuts, onion, palm oil, tomatoes) crops, the impact of falling production levels and soaring prices “extends beyond individual farmers or the economies of producer nations”, they wrote.