Nestle hit back at protesters' claims

Nestle has denied allegations of aggressive promoting, insisting that many of the claims made by protesters were “10 years out of date”.

Protesters were today expected to picket the Perrier comedy award in Edinburgh over its sponsor’s marketing tactics. Perrier is a Nestle-owned brand.

The protesters claim the multinational food firm, which owns the Perrier water brand, is guilty of aggressively promoting breast milk substitute to developing countries and endangering infant health.

Hilary Parsons, head of corporate affairs for Nestle UK, said: “We are extremely happy that people will visit our operations. We have got nothing to hide.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding about this issue with many of the concerns relating to practices that no longer exist.

“We stopped publicly promoting our infant formula many years ago, which means there have been no free samples and no advertising, and we are happy to abide by the World Health Organisation code on the matter.”

The winner of tonight’s award will be taken on a visit to the continent as part of a trip organised by the charity Comic Relief.

But in a letter in today’s Guardian, the charity stressed that it was not paying for the winner to attend the trip, and any plans Perrier had to show the winner its parent companies’ operations were separate.