Nestlé S.A., one of the world’s biggest food and beverage companies and a well-known consumer brand manufacturer, is doubling down on ecommerce.

Today, ecommerce, which includes direct-to-consumer and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) online sales, represents about 13% ($11.93 billion) of the company’s total annual sales of $91.80 billion, Nestlé says.

But in as soon as four years, Nestlé has ambitious plans to have ecommerce account for about 25% of all sales, the company says.

“We will continue to enhance our ecommerce offerings and increase our spend in digital marketing,” Nestlé head of strategic business units and marketing and sales Bernard Meunier told attendees at the company’s recent investor’s day conference. “In parallel, we will focus on capturing more valuable consumer data points in the ongoing quest to deeply understand our consumers and build more impactful and personalized experiences for them, taking our sales online from around 13% at the end of 2020 to 25% by 2025, double the average of total consumer goods.”

To generate more business and sales from ecommerce Nestlé is investing more in digital marketing and data analysis, Meunier says. “Since 2019, our e-retail media investment, made directly with e-commerce platforms, has more than doubled,” he says.

Nestlé, maker of products that include baby food, medical food, bottled water, breakfast cereals, coffee and tea, confectionery, dairy products, ice cream, frozen food, pet foods, and snacks, laid out specific metrics that demonstrate how the company expects to grow ecommerce.

They include:

• Increase consumer data records from about 250 million in 2020 to about 400 million records in 2025. “On a weekly basis, we speak with more than 200,000 consumers, we monitor 500,000 product reviews every month and analyze millions of interactions,” Meunier says.
• Increase the amount of money spent on digital marketing from 47% of the marketing budget to 70% in four years.

“We know we need to win in every shelf everywhere, from organic search to advanced content. This is what drives the highest conversion rates,” Meunier says. “So, like digital native brands, we currently track daily all key online stores that carry our brands in more than 60 markets to ensure content accuracy, product availability and to review consumer feedback, critical details that can increase our products add-to-cart rate by up to 30%—this is the new reality of our markets to support the e-commerce acceleration.”

Nestlé’s well-known brands include Gerber, Poland Spring, Kit Kat, Starbucks Coffee at Home, DiGiorno, Hot Pockets, Lean Cuisine, Häagen-Dazs, Purina, Friskies, and others.

“We have integrated new talents and experts to further accelerate in areas such as data science, digital experience and digital media—more than 500 digital experts worldwide and even more account managers dedicated to e-commerce,” Meunier says.

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