Walk into Nestlé’s headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, and the first thing you notice is the calm: Maybe it’s the light coming through the striking modernist building off Lake Geneva; maybe it’s the fact that everyone The Stack talks to in passing seems to have been working at the company for decades, maybe it’s just because it’s a Friday and half the team at HQ are working from home, but the mood is distinctly sedate.
Scratch the surface though and there is, inevitably, a great deal happening. It would be strange if it weren’t. Nestlé, after all, is the world’s largest food and beverage company, selling coffee (Nescafé, Nespresso, Starbucks Coffee at Home), cereals (Cheerios, Shredded Wheat, Nesquik), and petfood (Purina, Friskies, Tidy Cats) among other well-known logos – thirty of which are “billionaire” brands in their own right.
It sells around one billion products a day; has a footprint in 185 countries, 270,000+ staff and 335 factories in 75 countries. At any given moment its staff are interacting with farmers, with freight providers, with scientists, with a complex distribution network and of with a vast network of retailers and customers globally.
The digital systems that underpin its complex supply chains, factories, and enterprise IT are also hard at work: In 2022 Nestlé made one of the biggest enterprise ERP cloud migrations to Azure in history, spanning 200 SAP ECC instances, 10,000-plus servers, and 1.2 petabytes of data. It is now migrating to S/4HANA; streamlining its “data foundations”; testing agentic workflows; and busy building digital twins of its plants.
A major drive is underway to further optimise its data systems with the aim of driving more innovation, optimising production, distribution and overall efficiency.
As Nestlé CEO Philipp Navratil put in the company’s annual report, the firm is “simplifying our structure, clarifying roles and reducing duplication” across the organisation in a bid to further “digitalize its operations, automate its processes, embed AI and other new technologies, and fully leverage its shared services.”
(These will, he noted, “result in some headcount reductions.”)
Introducing the CIDO
The man in charge of much of this digital and data layer is Nestlé’s Group Chief Information & Digital Officer (CIDO) Chris Wright – a Britain-born, Switzerland-based physicist by training, who joined Nestlé in 2004 as a graduate. Wright, who became CIDO in January 2026 (having led IT as CIO since 2021), oversees an IT estate that comprises some 7,000 applications, of which roughly 1,500 are global, and a large cloud footprint. It rolls very little of its own IT infrastructure, bar a data center supporting R&D. His broad IT function employs some 5,000 people at Nestlé.
