Do you ensure that all workers in your value chain earn a living wage and work under safe conditions?

Business as Usual allows exploitation and underpayment to persist

Nestlé

Nestlé is one of the largest food companies in the world, operating highly complex global supply chains. Its model is built on scale, efficiency, and sourcing from thousands of suppliers across multiple continents. This structure makes cost control and volume optimization central to its operations.

Despite public commitments to fair sourcing, structural issues around living wages and safe working conditions continue to appear in parts of its value chain. In sectors like cocoa and coffee, reports of underpayment and poor labor conditions have persisted for years, suggesting that existing initiatives do not fully address underlying power imbalances in the supply chain.

The scale and fragmentation of Nestlé’s sourcing model make accountability difficult. When price pressure is passed down through long supply chains, labor conditions at the beginning of the chain often absorb the cost, while value is concentrated further downstream.

Future Entrepreneurs offer a living wage and security in their value chain

Moyee Coffee

Moyee Coffee takes a different approach through its FairChain model. Instead of extracting most value in consuming countries, it aims to retain a larger share of value in producing regions by rethinking where processing and value creation take place.

By roasting coffee closer to origin and working directly with farmers, Moyee reduces the number of intermediaries in the chain. This allows a larger share of revenue to flow back to producers, improving income stability and strengthening local economic structures.

The model is designed to make fair wages and better working conditions part of the system rather than an external add-on. Value distribution is built into the structure of the chain.

What you can do

If you want to organize your value chain like a Future Entrepreneur, here are some practical tips:

• Map where value is captured and where risk sits
  Identify who carries the lowest wages and highest risks in your value chain, and redesign contracts or sourcing to correct imbalances.
• Build living wage assumptions into pricing
  Do not treat fair wages as a cost burden. Integrate them into your baseline pricing and margin structure from the start.
• Reduce distance between value creation and production
  Shorten supply chains or increase direct partnerships so more value remains with the people doing the work.