Nestlé Was Warned Its Baby Formula Could Kill Babies — and It Never Really Stopped. In 2026, the Scandal Came Back.

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Issue #035   ·   Things Companies   ·   July 2026

Nestlé Was Warned Its Baby Formula Could Kill Babies — and It Never Really Stopped. In 2026, the Scandal Came Back.

In 1974, a report titled “The Baby Killer” accused Nestlé of helping drive sickness and death among infants in the developing world — not through poison, but through marketing. The boycott that followed became the longest-running in consumer history, and it has never truly ended. What came after was a landmark global health code that the United States alone voted against, decades of accusations that the company kept breaking the rules, and a product that stayed in the headlines for half a century. In early 2026, the formula was pulled from shelves in sixty countries. This was never a single mistake. It was a pattern.

As you read this, in the early months of 2026, Nestlé is recalling baby formula from shelves in roughly sixty countries.

The recall covers batches of its SMA infant and follow-on formula. The cause is a toxin called cereulide — produced by a strain of bacteria — traced not to a Nestlé factory but to a single ingredient: an oil supplied by a third-party manufacturer in China, used in formula by Nestlé and by its competitors Danone and Lactalis alike.

The response has not been tidy. Vietnam ordered all sales of the affected Nestlé brands halted. Hong Kong food-safety authorities, weeks after the first recall, found the toxin in five further samples. In France, by February, health authorities were investigating reports of three infant deaths, around fifty adverse-event reports, and fourteen hospitalisations linked to consumption of recalled formula. The watchdog FoodWatch accused Nestlé of having known about contamination since early December 2025 — and of not extending the recall publicly to some sixty countries until January.

Here is the part that matters, and the part that is easy to get wrong: as of writing, no causal link has been established between the formula and those infant deaths. The investigations are ongoing. It would be both false and unfair to say the formula killed three babies. What can be said is narrower, and still serious enough: a company recalled baby food across sixty countries, and there are deaths under investigation.

If this were the first time Nestlé and baby formula had collided, it would be a contained — if alarming — product-safety story. It is not the first time. It is the latest entry in a file that runs back more than fifty years.

The Baby Killer

In 1974, the British charity War on Want published a pamphlet with a title that did not leave much room for interpretation: “The Baby Killer.” It laid out a chain of cause and effect that, once seen, is difficult to unsee.

As birth rates fell in the West, formula companies — Nestlé chief among them — went looking for new markets in poorer countries. The tactic that drew the most outrage was the use of so-called “milk nurses”: sales representatives dressed in nurses’ uniforms, sent into maternity wards and homes to hand out free samples and promote formula as the modern, superior, Western way to feed a baby.

The free samples were the trap. A mother who used formula for a few weeks would find her own breast milk drying up — lactation, once stopped, does not simply restart. Now dependent on a product she had to buy, and often poor, she would stretch it: mixing in too little powder, or using the only water available, which in much of the developing world was not safe to drink.

Formula mixed with dirty water, fed to an infant with none of the antibodies breast milk provides, in a place with poor sanitation, is not nutrition. It is a route to infection. The result, critics charged, was preventable malnutrition, diarrhoea, and infant death — at scale.

The Boycott, and the One Country That Said No

On the fourth of July, 1977, activists in the United States launched a boycott of Nestlé. It spread — to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe. Churches signed on. Universities banned the products. It would become one of the longest-running consumer boycotts ever mounted.

The pressure produced something concrete. In 1981, after years of negotiation, the World Health Assembly adopted the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes — a global standard banning the advertising of formula, the free samples, the gifts to health workers, the milk nurses. The vote was 118 to 1.

The one was the United States. Under the new Reagan administration, the US cast the sole vote against a code designed to stop babies dying — a position so striking that the US House of Representatives voted 301 to 100 to formally rebuke its own government. The top health official at USAID, Stephen Joseph, called the vote unconscionable and resigned in protest. A presidential nominee for a human-rights post withdrew after it emerged that his think tank had taken money from Nestlé.

The Scandal That Refused to Close

Here is the pattern that sets Nestlé’s case apart from a one-off corporate disgrace. It never actually ends.

The original boycott was suspended in 1984, after Nestlé pledged to follow the new WHO Code. It was relaunched in 1988, when campaigners said the company was breaking the code through indirect marketing. In 1999, the UK’s advertising regulator ruled against Nestlé for claiming in an anti-boycott advert that it marketed formula “ethically and responsibly” — the regulator found it could not support the claim.

Some institutions made their peace: when Nestlé was admitted to a responsible-investment index in 2011, several churches ended their support for the boycott. Others never did. The campaign is still run today by the group Baby Milk Action, which maintains a live list of Nestlé brands to avoid — led, pointedly, by Nescafé. And the underlying fight has never left the agenda: as recently as 2025, the World Health Assembly was still passing resolutions, now aimed at the digital marketing of breast-milk substitutes.

Forty-nine years after the boycott began, the issue was not history. And then, in early 2026, the formula started coming off the shelves again.

A report called Nestlé a baby killer in 1974. The company sued the people who repeated it — and a judge told the company to change.

The boycott that followed has outlived presidents, reversed a superpower’s position, and never formally ended.

In 2026, the world’s most boycotted food company pulled its baby formula from sixty countries.

SOURCES

War on Want — “The Baby Killer” (1974), written by Mike Muller. The original report accusing the infant-formula industry, and Nestlé in particular, of contributing to infant deaths in the developing world through aggressive marketing.

Arbeitsgruppe Dritte Welt (Third World Action Group, Switzerland) — “Nestlé tötet Babys” / “Nestlé Kills Babies” (1974); the libel trial Nestlé brought against the group concluded in 1976.

World Health Organization — International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, World Health Assembly Resolution WHA34.22, adopted 21 May 1981 (118 votes to 1; the United States cast the sole negative vote).

The Washington Post — “U.S., Almost Alone, Casts Ballot Against Code on Baby Formula” (21 May 1981).

UPI Archives — contemporaneous coverage of the 1981 WHO Code vote and the US position (21 May 1981).

EBSCO Research Starters — “World Health Organization Adopts a Code on Breast-Milk Substitutes” (US House 301–100 rebuke; USAID official Stephen Joseph’s resignation; the Lefever nomination and Nestlé grants).

Brady, J.P. — “Marketing breast milk substitutes: problems and perils throughout the world,” Archives of Disease in Childhood (2012).

1977 Nestlé boycott — documented history of the boycott’s launch, its 1984 suspension and 1988 relaunch; International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) monitoring.

UK Advertising Standards Authority — ruling against Nestlé’s “ethical and responsible” marketing claim (1999).

Baby Milk Action / IBFAN (babymilkaction.org) — the current Nestlé boycott campaign and product list, and coverage of the 2025–2026 infant-formula recalls.

FoodNavigator — “Nestlé infant formula scandal escalates” (8 January 2026): the global SMA recall over cereulide and the supplier-ingredient source.

FoodWatch — criticism of the recall timeline (contamination known since early December 2025; public recall extended to ~60 countries in January 2026).

World Health Assembly — Resolution WHA78.18, “Regulating the digital marketing of breast-milk substitutes” (27 May 2025).

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