Nestlé shares the good life with its host communities

By: Gail J. Pelayo

estlé is known worldwide to support peoples’ passion for quality life by offering the best products money can buy. Good food, good life, they say, is the essence of Nestlé. Closer to home, Nestlé Philippines is implementing programs which aim to improve the lives of people in the communities which are hosts to its factories – Lipa (Batangas), Cabuyao (Laguna), Aurora (Quezon City), Marikina City, and Cagayan De Oro.
Nestlé conducts various workshops on small business ventures which people in the community can do to augment their incomes.

Smorgasbord of projects
Nowadays, especially in big families, one breadwinner is not enough to sustain the family’s daily needs. Housewives, therefore, are forced to find ways and means to increase household income. This led Nestlé to create the Yard and Garden Livelihood Project open to unemployed housewives who want to contribute to their respective family’s coffers by capitalizing on their sweat, patience, and their green thumbs. Nestlé extends financial support for planting materials such as seedlings, fertilizers, pesticides, and gardening equipment.

Nestlé teaches vegetable farming to residents of its host communities

The inside compound
of the Nestlé Lipa Factory serves as the “green” classroom for gardening and vegetable farming.
Nestlé also provides seminars and workshops in cutflower production and proper garden maintenance.In turn, ornamental plants and flowers from the workshops are used to improve the physical appearance of the factory’s vicinity. The vegetables, on the other hand, are sold to the factory cafeteria, assuring employees that what they are eating are fresh.
For housewives who do not have green thumb, Nestlé has put in place the Suklay at Gunting Project, a fun and practical way to earn money for housewives and even men who have the interest and knack for styling. Nestlé, together with the Love Lipa Foundation, conducts hands-on training in hair styling. Nestlé and the Love Lipa Foundation provide each participant with a hairdresser’s kit containing scissors, cape, hairbrush, comb, and other tools for hairdressing to help them get started.
Another Nestlé project in the Lipa Factory is Cut and Sew.

While helping participants enrolled in the Cut and Sew project find employment, Nestlé also gets to supply its own needs for uniforms, shoe covers, rags and hairnets

It provides employment to those in the community who know how to bring pieces of cloth and materials together and transform them to something useful like uniforms, rags, shoe covers, and hairnets. While helping participants enrolled in the project find employment, the factory also gets to supply its own needs for uniforms, shoe covers, rags, and hairnets.

At the Cabuyao Factory, Nestlé trains housewives to become effective speakers so that they can later be hired to conduct training and seminars for others in the community.