Food giant Nestlé has been left “counting the cost” of pushing up prices of its most popular brands beyond the reach of “increasingly squeezed customers”, says Sian Bradley in The Times. It has been forced to cut its sales guidance again.
Underlying sales increased by an unexpectedly weak 2% in the first nine months of this year, which means that it now expects sales to rise by only 2% over the full year, “the lowest rate since the turn of the century”. Experts have blamed the malaise on Nestlé’s decision “not to ease up quickly enough on price increases” as inflation has cooled, as many of its competitors did.
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