Few brands have as much of a global presence as those owned by Nestlé. The Swiss company is behind some of the world’s most recognizable household names, whether that’s Nespresso, KitKat, or Maggi, across 188 countries. But how do you keep these many brands relevant to millions of consumers?
The first step is something as simple as how it’s packaged, Ximena O’Reilly, Nestlé’s global head of design, tells Fortune. Nestlé’s packaging “is the brand in your hand,” she said. “If we have no way of communicating with you, other than making sure that you see our lonely pack on a shelf, we want to make sure it does a great job.”
Nestlé is over 150 years old, and some of its most famous brands aren’t much younger than that. Its products can be found in markets the world over, targeted to all income levels. The packaged food giant needs to navigate a mess of different consumer tastes, design preferences, and regulatory complexities.
That global presence means “understanding and respect is key,” O’Reilly said. “The borderless world that we live in means that we need to be thinking a little bit differently about our design experiences, whether they be on packaging or through digital experiences.”
“If packaging is not powerful, then it's not doing its job. We want it to be a hero,” she says.
Sustainability shift and keeping up with Gen Z
Younger consumers are less willing to splurge on disposable and wasteful packaging. That’s forcing Nestlé—a major producer of packaging waste in its own right—to adapt.
As the world's largest food and beverage company, Nestlé has a giant environmental footprint. Earlier this year, the company dropped pledges to make some of its key brands carbon-neutral, instead looking for emissions savings in its operations and supply chain. Critics also accuse the company of making misleading claims about its environmental performance; Nestlé, for its part, has appointed a panel of experts to double-check its environmental claims to push back against the "greenwashing" label.
O’Reilly concedes that design and packaging play a large role in how more environmentally aware consumers perceive the brand, especially among the younger generation.
Nestlé has adopted a shift to sustainable practices that aims to create less waste and cut down on plastic use. The company, for instance, hopes to make 95% of its packaging material recyclable by 2025—that figure stood at roughly 86% as of 2022. Nestlé has also tried to highlight its sustainability efforts through product packaging, such as on the back of Nescafé’s Excella powder in Japan.
The company is also changing its products to meet the times. For instance, the Swiss food giant launched a vegan version of KitKat last year.
But Nestlé can’t be too sudden in changing the products and packaging that people already know and love, O'Reilly warns.
“Are we doing enough yet? No, because again, we have some legacy brands where we need to be very cautious to not introduce change that loses a consumer," she says. "We need to do it in such a way that we take our current consumers along [with us]."
AI reshaping Nestlé’s design efforts
One of O’Reilly’s innovations in design was to give Nestlé's products a “backstory”—an apt term in more ways than one, as the company tried to leverage the back of a particular product's packaging and make it more than a jumble of mandatory nutritional information.
Nestlé can "shine a focus on the brands with purpose storytelling because, behind any action that we may be taking, there is something that we can say about it,” she said. For example, a Nestlé product might include a QR code that gives shoppers more information about its commitments, or serve as a call to action for consumers, without sacrificing the space allotted to nutritional information.
“The challenge was how can we figure out what we want to say, and how can we prioritize that? How do you come up with storytelling that's really going to be powerful and impactful and doesn't just feel generic?” she says.
Still, Nestlé must comply with diverse, complicated, and ever-changing rules about the nutritional information it needs to give consumers. (Regulators have dinged the company in the past for making exaggerated claims about nutrition; the company now pledges to be far more transparent about its products.)
O’Reilly thinks machine learning can help. Nestlé is now hoping to build links between its recipe and regulatory databases, to create one source of truth and reference, she says. AI can help achieve that by allowing Nestlé to more quickly tailor packaging to match what regulations require.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could add a layer of machine learning, so that it can anticipate some of those [regulatory] adjustments in the future?” she asks. “It’s one of the least sexy parts of AI, but it’s so important.”
Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference is returning on Dec. 6 at the MGM Cotai in Macau, China. Panelists and attendees will debate and discuss “Empathy in the Age of AI” or how new technologies are revolutionizing the creative industry.
