In the threads I see people focusing on the origin of the contaminated material. I think that misses the point that you have to deal with this by testing at the point where the ingredients are assembled into a final product, because it can’t be removed from whatever feed stock creates the individual ingredients.

Of course, ideally the manufacturer of the component ingredient also does the testing but in manufacturing you never trust your suppliers- you need your own testing engineers if you are putting your brand on the product and taking responsibility for it.

This is a bit slandering, no? Cargill is a key supplier of arachidonic acid, and let’s say that’s where Nestlé gets it.

Are they at fault for Cargill’s sourcing of Chinese ARA/DHA? Okay, they are, let’s say. But why are you buying virtually any product? It’s your fault that lots of manufacturing is done in China. Go make your own algae oil to put in your baby formula and we’ll discuss the pricing.

What’s more interesting about all this: a) product recalls work fast; b) the baby formula industry is too dependent on a handful of suppliers of key ingredients; c) our brand of formula doesn’t use AHA so we appear to be safe for now.

> It's the greed at topest level.

You say this as if it's some deviant behaviour that needs correcting.

But greed is normal and expected in a free market economy. Suppliers are expected to seek to reduce their costs and maximise their profits.

It's not like any other country knows how to manufacture things. Outsourcing and greed rotted our economies from the core outwards.

I try to boycott them as much as possible. I thought the boycott nestle thing was just a weird Reddit thing until actually reading about this company. It’s pretty sickening.

Chinese citizens routinely import baby formula from the West because they don't trust their own country's manufacturing standards.

Something to think about.

ok then, just try and report ANYTHING directly to ANY mega corp and lets say you happen to finnaly get through to a human at that company, and they then try to push it up, while you are listening, and hear them bieng completly unable to do anything from within the company from there lowly level. It is an almost absolute guarantee that the top levels will not be required to be involved in this in any way, as this will be relegated to trumpeters and sin eaters, hired for just such occasions by there staff.

Where I leave we were informed about the scandal after the products had been replaced. Makes me wonder what the priorities are.

>Im always wondering why it takes them so long to find out and inform the public?

Problems with babies diets are hard to identify generally. Frankly I'm amazed this was identified with only 36 sick infants.

Consumers of baby formula are known for having a high baseline rate of spewing things out their holes and having a pretty high standard deviation on top of that rate. And of course the babies are getting older all this time and changing their diets and responses to things. So a large subset of parents are just gonna write it off as "I guess now that my baby is X months old this brand of formula gives him the shits/upsets their stomach." There's also likely confounding changes. And it's not like they can tell you "hey this tastes different than last week's". It's gonna take a while to ID that there's a problem and then actually correlate it to anything (consumption of a specific problem product in this case).

It's not like the kids are turning blue or some other "obviously not right" symptom. That'd be identified and root caused within the week of the first case.

Seems to be happening more frequently than one would expect. A month ago a batch of nestle baby formula was recalled in Cyprus for the same reason https://en.politis.com.cy/social-lens/979647/nestle-expands-...

IIRC that was deceptive marketing. It was something like selling non-formula as formula, or selling formula as better for babies than breastmilk.

Not similar in terms of intent