Nestlé, Water management and operations

Continuous drive for improvement

The improvements in water-use efficiency in Nestlé’s factories year after year are the result of setting water-saving targets for all factories and supporting factory management in meeting them. It enables identification of those factories where efforts need to be improved to meet targets and where improvement matters most with respect to local water conditions. Nestlé’s environmental officers and engineers play a key role in driving continuous water management improvements. They meet regularly with management representatives to raise awareness for the importance of water, to discuss performance improvement opportunities, or address reasons for failures to meet targets. Nestlé’s objective is to become the most efficient water user amongst food manufacturers. High performing factories: In 2006, over 100 Nestlé factories (dots) managed to reduce their water consumption by at least 3% as compared with the previous year.

Internal benchmarking of water management efficiency

Because the Chachoengsao factory in Thailand is located in a region of very limited water supply, it has developed sophisticated measures to minimize water use and to maximize recycling of water. The recent advances in water efficiencies in its factories make it ever more challenging for Nestlé to realise future improvements. To address the need for new levels of sophistication, the Nestlé Energy Management Tool (NEMT) was developed to allow detailed mapping of flows and uses of key resources in its factories, water, energy and waste. NEMT is currently tested to be rolled out for use in all factories and will allow comparison between factories at the level of individual processes. For water management, this creates a micro-view that enables improvement and sharing of knowledge about technology and processes to further reduce the relative use of water in all factories.