Cereulide is a toxin produced by some strains of Bacillus cereus, a common environmental bacterium found in soil, dust, and raw agricultural materials.
Cereulide acts on cells’ mitochondria and can cause rapid-onset symptoms like vomiting, stomach cramps, and diarrhea.
During manufacturing, raw ingredients used in baby formula such as oils (e.g., arachidonic acid, or ARA oil) or dry powders can be contaminated with spores of B. cereus or pre-formed cereulide.
Because spores and the toxin survive processing, they must be prevented by testing ingredients before inclusion.
Of course, ideally the manufacturer of the component ingredient also does the testing but in manufacturing you never trust your suppliers- you need your own testing engineers if you are putting your brand on the product and taking responsibility for it.
It is a shame for Nestle to have to import ingredients from China for such simple products anyway. It's the greed at topest level.
Are they at fault for Cargill’s sourcing of Chinese ARA/DHA? Okay, they are, let’s say. But why are you buying virtually any product? It’s your fault that lots of manufacturing is done in China. Go make your own algae oil to put in your baby formula and we’ll discuss the pricing.
What’s more interesting about all this: a) product recalls work fast; b) the baby formula industry is too dependent on a handful of suppliers of key ingredients; c) our brand of formula doesn’t use AHA so we appear to be safe for now.
You say this as if it's some deviant behaviour that needs correcting.
But greed is normal and expected in a free market economy. Suppliers are expected to seek to reduce their costs and maximise their profits.
OK, technically true, just like saying "water flows downhill" when someone's house is flooding. It isn't productive, the fact is well known.
"The system incentivizes this" and "this is good/bad" are two entirely different statements. One doesn't address the other [1], until you make a moral judgement about the outcome.
> You say this as if it's some deviant behaviour that needs correcting.
Is it moral and correct for infants to be fed contaminated baby formula? The mismatch between what is and what ought to be is deviance.
You could buy whatever random Chinese milk powder brand. But Nestle is advertising itself on the upmost quality and care for you kids. Especially the brand impacted.
It's like going to a restaurant selling the best homemade luxury food and you go to the kitchen and you find that they cook expired supermarket frozen food because they greedily were thinking that it would be more profitable.
I believe that Nestle epitomizes the latter.
Something to think about.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Beh...
Chances are you're still buying Nestle. You can check here.
e.g. here is the recall in Flanders,Belgium,for 2026-01-05, so more than a month ago:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/01/05/nestle-nan-babyvoedi...
Here is one English source about the deaths in France:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nestl...
Problems with babies diets are hard to identify generally. Frankly I'm amazed this was identified with only 36 sick infants.
Consumers of baby formula are known for having a high baseline rate of spewing things out their holes and having a pretty high standard deviation on top of that rate. And of course the babies are getting older all this time and changing their diets and responses to things. So a large subset of parents are just gonna write it off as "I guess now that my baby is X months old this brand of formula gives him the shits/upsets their stomach." There's also likely confounding changes. And it's not like they can tell you "hey this tastes different than last week's". It's gonna take a while to ID that there's a problem and then actually correlate it to anything (consumption of a specific problem product in this case).
It's not like the kids are turning blue or some other "obviously not right" symptom. That'd be identified and root caused within the week of the first case.
