"nestle" news and stories

Nestlé Prepared Foods is recalling more than 10,000 pounds of a popular frozen entrée due to possible contamination with foreign materials.

The company has issued a recall for 9.5-oz. packages of its "Lean Cuisine Simple Favorites" spaghetti with meatballs dinners. The recall is limited to specific packages with the production code "0298595519P." The code can be found by looking for the gray "proof of purchase" label beneath the product's ingredient statement. The entrées carry a "best before" date of November 2011 and were shipped to retail stores east of the Rocky Mountains.

Nestle recalled the products after consumers in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin complained that they had discovered pieces of hard red plastic in the frozen dinners.

The company is telling consumers who purchased these Lean Cuisine dinners with the above production code not to consume the product. Instead they should contact the company at (866) 606-8264 or via leancuisine@casupport.com.


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There's a new Nestle formula in the works, and it's quite a trick: Design food that will make us feel fuller quicker and stay feeling full longer. Given the high obesity rates in America, this might sound like a good thing, but listen to how it works.

Scientists of the Swiss chocolate company are trying to understand how your "gut brain" works by learning the language of digestion, reports the Wall Street Journal. To figure this out, they've designed a million-dollar see-through model of the human stomach. Then they fed it foods like regular olive oil and olive oil with monoglycerides, and found that the latter, while making you feel more full could also prove more difficult for the stomach to digest. So they're tinkering with this knowledge to come up with what they hope will be the best of both worlds -- foods that tell your brain you're full and your stomach to feel healthy and satisfied.

New products could hit shelves within the next five years, in many forms other than chocolate. Nestle also produces drinks, bottled water, cereal, coffee, frozen foods and pet food. While we have to admit it's interesting to be able to track how our bodies respond to food at every stage, tricking it might be a slippery slope we're not prepared to handle. Candy bar, anyone?

If you believe the ads, the probiotic-lined straw in Boost Kid Essentials drink would "prevent upper respiratory infections, strengthen the immune system and reduce absences from school." Wow, does it do windows, too? Making wild claims is nothing new in the food industry, but it looks like the government is starting to crack down. The Federal Trade Commission went after Nestle, the maker of the drink, claiming the ads went too far.

The company agreed to stop making the claims. The straws contained a dose of L. Reuteri Protectis, a probiotic culture marketed by a company called BioGaia. The popularity of probiotics has skyrocketed in the past few years, with consumers finding doses of the "good" bacteria in yogurts, juices, and powders. Manufacturers claim the products help regulate internal flora, improving health and digestive function.

Evidently, though, the government wasn't impressed with Nestle's ads, and sent them a warning letter late last year.

Using Facebook and Youtube, Greenpeace stared down Nestle, and Nestle blinked.

According to the London Independent newspaper, Nestle -- the giant, Swiss-based food conglomerate that operates in 86 countries around the world and employs hundreds of thousands of people -- had been under virtual fire for three months for its use of palm oil in many of its products, especially KitKat, Aero and Quality Street.

Greenpeace asserted that the palm oil was harvested unethically, at the expense of indigenous forests and the wildlife (like Orangutans) that live in them.

The palm oil controversy was not originally aimed solely at Nestle. Many food companies use it, of course, including Cadbury and Mars, competing confectioners to Nestle. But when certain methods of palm oil farming were exposed as unethical, those companies vowed to stick to sustainable farming practices.

But Nestle dragged its feet, promising only to meet the latest acceptable date of 2015 set by the World Wildlife Fund, reports the Independent, so Greenpeace grew impatient and waged a media campaign that some might term virtual guerrilla warfare (or gorilla warfare, as the case may be).