Yasser Abdul Malak, the Chairman and CEO of Nestlé for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) sits down for his first public interview since assuming the top job at the food giant
Quality Street, Coffee Mate, Maggi, Nescafé – what do all of these have in common? Food giant Nestlé is behind them all, and in nearly every home across the Middle East. A global conglomerate with hundreds of brands and over a century of food innovation and expertise, Nestlé has played an intrinsic role, and borne witness, to the changing habits and customs associated with food.
In the Middle East, while food is deeply embedded with cultural values it is no stranger to change, and it is in adapting to and foreseeing this change that Yasser Abdul Malak, the Chairman and CEO of Nestlé for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region sees as his biggest challenge.
“The decision we have is to disrupt or be disrupted, and of course we want to disrupt,” he says.
In our hour-long conversation, Abdul Malak, who quips that his favourite chocolate and coffee are, unsurprisingly, KitKat and Nespresso, frequently refers to how as the region has rapidly developed, and changed, Nestlé has had to innovate too.
As an example, Abdul Malak points to Saudi women, noting that while historically many might have had time to visit a shopping mall for their food needs, today most are working, meaning time is at a premium and convenience a must.
Our conversation comes after Abdul Malak took up the position of CEO in January 2022, and is his first public interview. Looking back over what he already accomplished in his tenure, the CEO says: “What we have done over the past 20 months is we’ve made an informed decision to be much closer to the consumer.”
Abdul Malak has been at Nestlé a long time – nearly 25 years at the time of publication – and has moved throughout the organisation in the Middle East. His experience has left him to realise that the strategies the firm used to target consumers in the past “don’t work anymore.”
For instance, while the company might have once used one commercial across the region, now “you need a Saudi campaign for Saudi, Kuwaiti for Kuwait, Qatari for Qatari, and hence you need to be really much closer to the consumer.”
While increasing the company’s consumer focus, Abdul Malak has also sought to empower leaders on the ground across the region “to decide and decide fast. Agility, speed, and decision making is another focus we have had.”
“We believe in our size, we are one of the biggest in food and beverage in the region, we are the biggest in the world. We believe that we can have an active role working together with governments across the region establishing their vision and their inspiring strategy for their countries,” he says.
Moving a behemoth
This size has both its advantages and disadvantages, however. Innovation and disruption remain corporate buzzwords on the lips of every senior business leader around the world. Truly embracing innovation and building for creativity are no easy feats, and are especially challenging the larger a firm is.
While Nestlé may be “the biggest in the world” and “in almost every household in the region,” this size and marketplace advantage can also breed complacency, Abdul Malak warned.
“I hate the fact that we say, ‘if we’re big, we’re an elephant, we’re slow’… When you’re leading in most brands and you have a portfolio that is 150 years old, it’s very easy to just continue doing the same. That’s why we have to acknowledge disruption and take responsibility to design and work with stakeholders on what the future of food will be,” Abdul Malak says.
Key to innovation is speed, or as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once famously said, to “Move fast and break things.”
Embracing this form of almost
Schumpeterian creative destruction is a challenging endeavour for any large corporation, often wracked as they are by ponderous layers of decision making and approvals.
In this vein, Nestlé is “working on making meetings much more efficient. We introduced something which is still in the making, which is straight talk. The last thing you want is to sugar-coat, you want to move fast. The mindset of speed and agility is something we are working on,” Abdul Malak explains.
This focus on the process of creating and increasing speed has led to a wholesale change in the firm’s cycle of innovation. “In the past, it could take two to three years to innovate. Today, we’re talking about six months maximum from idea to store.”
Taking this dynamic even further, the company has also began altering its approach to the startup ecosystem, viewing these small disruptive companies “not as competitors, but rather enablers… If we work together [with startups], we can do much more in the region.”
Changing the direction of the Nestlé behemoth has been challenging, however, especially when viewed in the context of the region’s own economic climate. “The past five to eight years have not been easy, with economic challenges and social unrest, then the global pandemic-imposed supply chain challenges, followed by unprecedented cost inflation,” Abdul Malak says.
However, while there have been challenges, the CEO is also buoyant on the future.
“This region presents an absolute great opportunity. We know there have been challenges, but in this region, you need to have thick skin for challenges because anything can happen anytime. The uncertainty is all over and we need to be ready for that. What we’ve done with the team is acknowledge that change and disruption are going to be there and continue.”
The challenge associated with the global supply chain both during and in the aftermath of Covid-19 has also altered Nestlé’s priorities, with a focus now on local supply and food security. Fortunately, local supply also intersects with another important trend, that of sustainability.
While Abdul Malak admits that consumers haven’t quite seized on the sustainability bandwagon in the Middle East as they have done in other parts of the world, he does see that dynamic changing very quickly.
“Sustainability is not yet at the top of the agenda for consumers. However, at Nestlé our responsibility is to be at the forefront of this trend. We’re already addressing this today with 94 percent of our packaging ready for recycling,” he says.
“There’s not an easy solution to sustainability. But we’re progressing at the problem… Ultimately, I think in the coming 10 years, sustainability will become part and parcel of everything we do.”
Future foods
In between sips of a fresh espresso, a Nespresso of course, Abdul Malak maps out his vision for the future of food. “Ultra-convenience is something that we cannot ignore anymore… We used to talk about convenience mostly in Europe. It was never really something very important here, time was not an issue. Today, convenience is extremely important,” he says.
This needs to be accomplished while remembering that in the Middle East, “food is very rooted with culture, and we need to understand that this is a region with difference in culture and in cuisine which we need to respect.”
Even more esoteric, however, is how the food of the future will be consumed. “Food in a bottle is something that I believe is going to become bigger here, as in you could have a breakfast in a drink,” Abdul Malak says.
Again, this is a trend that the CEO says is already happening in Europe and is now replicating in the Middle East as the importance of health grows among consumers who are already “demanding today and expecting to snack healthier.” This shift has been further enabled by governments across the region, as long-term plans call for a general increase in wellbeing.
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, for instance, explicitly stipulates that improving public health and addressing health concerns as a central pillar of the country’s ambitious plan to transform the kingdom’s socio-economic structure. “Consumers are demanding today and expecting to snack healthier,” he says.
‘Diverse by design’
Talent has increasingly become a challenging topic across the Middle East. Competition among firms for the best talent is fierce, with people being the underlying driving force of the region’s growth agenda. For Nestlé, the firm is already 14,000 people strong, with “more inclusion and diversity on top of our agenda.”
“We have 77 nationalities, and more than 30 languages, it’s diverse by design. Inclusivity is a must. Gender and more representation of female colleagues is critical. Today in leadership and top management the ratio is around 30 percent, and we want to get to 40 percent and 50 percent. We’re moving fast because we have to walk the talk,” Abdul Malak says.
Finding new talent, however, is not an easy proposition, as the region’s development continues at breakneck speed. “We build, upskill and develop capability of roughly 100,000 people. That also gives us a pool to attract from so we’re doing well on that front. I have to say in some areas, it’s more challenging than others… There is the fact that we don’t know if this generation is going to be same where they can spend a lifetime in one company, so at the same time you need to be realistic,” he explains.
The demographic change of talent has also bled into the workplace, with Nestlé moving to accommodate the demands of a different workforce. For instance, the company has embraced flexible working hours and plans on changing its entire office layout – Abdul Malak even alludes to building a library inside the office for employees to work at inside the building.
While some senior executives “may prefer bringing people [into the office] together, that’s not going to happen anymore … The reality today has changed. It has evolved. We believed that we need to stop trying to hold back to what we had and take a step forward and be relevant in the future,” he explains.
When asked on what the future holds given the firm, as he boasts, is in every household, Abdul Malak quips that he wants to “also be in every car,” before more seriously noting that the opportunities in the region “are big,” but that he wants to avoid being “too rosy.”
“There are challenges, no doubt, you need to be prepared for what can happen anytime. I always say that you need to anticipate as this is the region of anticipation. This is the region of being resilient and determined, but at the same time, the opportunity is immense,” he explains.
There’s a lot of potential consumers in the Middle East to feed, with a population of 500 million that’s expected to rise to over 700 million by 2050. That’s an awful lot of mouths to feed, and it will be with some anticipation that we’ll see if Nestlé is up to the challenges.