In a region defined by logistical complexity and regulatory diversity, Nestlé South Asia is rewriting the playbook for supply chain excellence. In this exclusive interview, Varun Gupta, Supply Chain Director, Nestlé South Asia Region, shares how the company is balancing global standards with hyper-local execution—leveraging digitization, automation, and sustainability to build a Resilient, Responsive, and Future-Ready Supply Network. From predictive dashboards and AI-led forecasting to green logistics and ethical sourcing, he outlines the strategic pillars that are transforming Nestlé supply chain into a competitive advantage across South Asia’s dynamic markets.
How do you align Nestlé South Asia’s supply chain strategy across diverse markets with unique logistical and regulatory challenges?
Varun Gupta
Nestlé South Asia’s supply chain strategy balances global consistency with local adaptability. Core principles like safety, sustainability, and service remain central, but execution is tailored to each market’s logistical realities and regulatory frameworks. This includes deploying energy-efficient, digitally enabled warehouses and optimizing transport modes—such as electric vehicles and LNG—to suit regional infrastructure and environmental goals.
To ensure compliance and agility, Nestlé uses localized frameworks aligned with both internal standards and external regulations. End-to-end digital visibility through smart dashboards enables predictive planning and faster decision-making, helping reduce stockouts and improve service levels. This approach allows Nestlé to stay responsive to evolving market needs while maintaining operational excellence across diverse geographies.
What are the key pillars of your strategy to balance efficiency, agility, and cost competitiveness in the region?
Our strategy rests on 3 pillars:
Digitization: We harness advanced digital tools and analytics to enable real-time visibility across our supply chain. This includes smart dashboards that integrate data from sales, warehousing, and transport, allowing predictive alerts and faster decision-making. These capabilities help reduce stockouts, improve replenishment accuracy, and enhance responsiveness to market shifts. Additionally, we use AI-led demand forecasting, automated storage systems, and digital twins to simulate warehouse operations and anticipate demand fluctuations.
Network Optimization: Our logistics and distribution networks are continuously refined to reduce lead times and operational costs. This involves optimizing route planning, leveraging alternate transport modes like rail and sea, and adopting green logistics solutions such as electric vehicles and LNG. These efforts not only improve service delivery but also contribute to sustainability goals. The use of cost models and solvers in concurrent planning further enhances our ability to prioritize demand and manage inventory efficiently.
People’s Capability: We invest in building a resilient and innovative workforce by promoting a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. Through capability-building sessions, digital onboarding, and supplier engagement platforms like Business Partner Meets, we empower employees and partners to drive transformation. This pillar ensures that our teams are equipped to embrace change, foster innovation, and sustain improvements across the supply chain.
What role does end-to-end digital visibility play in enabling smarter, faster decisions—and can you share a recent example where it delivered measurable impact?
End-to-end digital visibility plays a transformative role in enhancing decision-making across Nestlé South Asia’s supply chain. By integrating data streams from sales, warehousing, and transport into a unified smart dashboard—powered by Power BI—we’ve created a real-time control tower that enables predictive alerts and rapid response capabilities.
This visibility allows teams to anticipate disruptions, optimize inventory levels, and align replenishment cycles with actual demand patterns. It also supports cross-functional collaboration by making performance metrics accessible and actionable across departments.
A recent example of its impact is the rollout of Power BI dashboards across our distribution centers. These dashboards were designed to reduce stockouts and improve replenishment accuracy. By leveraging real-time data, we achieved a measurable improvement of 100 basis points in stock availability and a 5% reduction in secondary dispatch delays. Additionally, factory and branch level DI dashboards have enabled granular tracking of movement and contribution across regions and business units, further strengthening our ability to make smarter, faster decisions.
How is Nestlé applying automation, AI, or advanced analytics to enhance planning, forecasting, and distribution across South Asia?
Nestlé South Asia is applying automation, AI, and advanced analytics to enhance planning, forecasting, and distribution through a suite of integrated technologies. AI-led demand forecasting helps us anticipate market shifts with greater precision, reducing inventory imbalances and improving service levels. We use digital twins to simulate warehouse operations, allowing us to test layouts, workflows, and throughput strategies virtually before implementing them physically resulting in better space utilization and operational efficiency.
A key enabler in this transformation is the Drishti Command Hub, which acts as a centralized control tower for real-time monitoring and decision-making. It integrates data from multiple supply chain nodes—factories, warehouses, and transport—providing predictive insights and actionable alerts. This visibility supports concurrent planning, route optimization, and waste reduction, especially critical in South Asia’s dynamic and diverse markets. Together, these tools empower our teams to respond faster, plan smarter, and deliver more reliably.
How do you encourage innovation and digital maturity among suppliers to build more resilient, responsive supply chains?
We treat suppliers not just as vendors, but as strategic partners in transformation. Our approach begins with digital onboarding, ensuring that suppliers are equipped with intuitive tools and platforms that align with our operational standards. This is followed by joint capability-building sessions, where we co-develop skills and share best practices in areas like safety, sustainability, and digital operations. These sessions foster a shared understanding of business goals and encourage suppliers to innovate within their own ecosystems.
A key initiative is our Business Partner Meets, which serve as collaborative platforms for suppliers to showcase their own digital and safety innovations. These events—like the one held in May 2024 in Gurgaon, May 2025 in Haridwar—create space for dialogue, recognition, and alignment on future priorities. Through these engagements, we promote a culture of continuous improvement and digital maturity, helping suppliers become more agile, transparent, and resilient. This ecosystem-wide uplift strengthens our supply chain’s ability to respond to disruptions and deliver consistent value.
What are Nestlé South Asia’s top priorities for building a sustainable supply chain, particularly in logistics and packaging?
Nestlé South Asia’s sustainable supply chain strategy is anchored on three core pillars: green logistics, eco-packaging, and carbon reduction. In green logistics, the focus is on transitioning to alternate fuels such as LNG and CNG and increasing the use of rail and sea transport to reduce road dependency and emissions. These efforts are supported by route optimization tools that help minimize fuel consumption and improve delivery efficiency. In packaging, Nestlé is actively reducing plastic usage and increasing the share of recyclable and reusable materials. This includes innovations in lightweight packaging and the use of mono-materials that simplify recycling processes.
The third pillar—carbon reduction—is driven by initiatives like solar-powered warehouses, which are being integrated into planning and infrastructure upgrades. These facilities not only reduce grid dependency but also contribute to Nestlé’s broader climate goals. All these efforts are aligned with Nestlé’s global commitments under SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative) and FLAG (Forests, Land, and Agriculture). SBTi provides a science-based framework for setting greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, while FLAG addresses emissions from land-based sectors, which account for nearly 25% of global emissions.
These frameworks are backed by global collaborations including CDP, UN Global Compact, WRI, and WWF, ensuring that Nestlé’s sustainability actions are both credible and impactful.
How do you ensure compliance with ESG standards across your supplier network, especially in areas like ethical sourcing and emissions reduction?
We follow a structured and aligned framework, leveraging supplier scorecards and traceability tools. For example, the Nestlé Cocoa Plan is designed to build a more sustainable supply chain. By collaborating with farmers, communities, and organizations, we aim not only to reduce our carbon footprint but also to support cocoa-farming communities and improve their livelihoods. The plan, recognized as an income accelerator, currently reaches over 150k farmers worldwide and offers full traceability.
To ensure compliance and ethical sourcing, our supply partners adhere to robust governance across four pillars: labor standards, health & safety, environmental stewardship, and business ethics—validated by third-party audits via SEDEX or Supplier Ethical Data Exchange, that enables ethical sourcing, risk management, and supplier transparency by centralizing data on labor, safety, environment, and business practices, additionally ensuring compliance and building responsible supply networks. I would like to point out that our sustainably sourced crops contribute to reduced GHG emissions.
What steps is Nestlé taking to strengthen and future-proof its local supplier ecosystems in South Asia?
We foster long-term supplier partnerships through strategic relationship meetings, innovation meets, and shared objectives. Our focus includes building a best-in-class supplier portal for agility and transparency, promoting digital literacy, and supporting financial inclusion via supplier financing programs. We also consistently invest in MSMEs to help suppliers scale sustainably and navigate market challenges.
What are the key supply chain drivers that enable Nestlé India to balance efficiency, resilience, and sustainability while ensuring products reach consumers across both urban and rural markets?
At Nestlé India, supply chain resilience is not just about efficiency, but also about responsibility towards the people and partners who make it possible. Truck drivers are the backbone of our logistics network, and with India’s logistics sector facing both acute driver shortages and high accident risks, we have made road safety a key driver of our supply chain strategy.
Through our initiative ‘Safety Every Second – Engage Heart and Mind’, we are working to reduce accidents and promote safer driving practices across our ecosystem. This includes training over 10,000 drivers in defensive driving, conducting regular health and eye camps in partnership with organizations like Sight Savers India, and ensuring only compliant and roadworthy vehicles are engaged for our deliveries. We are also leveraging technology such as GPS, AI enabled cameras, ADAS, real-time alerts, and in-transit visibility to drive digital enabled safety and efficiency.
Equally important, we engage over 150+ business partners through regular governance and collaboration, ensuring safety becomes a shared priority across the value chain. By embedding safety, compliance, and technology into our logistics operations, we not only strengthen the resilience and reliability of our supply chain, but also build a culture of care and responsibility for the people who keep it moving.
What leadership qualities are most critical to leading complex, future-ready supply chains in today’s dynamic environment?
In today’s dynamic and rapidly evolving environment, leading a future-ready supply chain requires a unique blend of strategic foresight, technological agility, and people-centric leadership. At Nestlé India, we believe that the most critical leadership qualities include the ability to anticipate market shifts and align supply chain operations with long-term business goals. Embracing digital transformation—through AI, automation, and predictive analytics—is essential to driving efficiency and responsiveness across the value chain.
Equally important is collaborative leadership that fosters cross-functional alignment and innovation at scale. Resilience and risk management are vital in navigating disruptions while maintaining continuity and compliance. As sustainability becomes central to supply chain strategy, leaders must champion ethical sourcing, circularity,= and low-carbon logistics. Above all, empowering teams and nurturing a culture of ownership and capability building ensures operational excellence.
These qualities are key to delivering on Nestlé’s purpose of ‘Good Food, Good Life’—responsibly, efficiently, and with lasting impact.
What is the biggest talent challenges you face in supply chain roles across South Asia, and how are you addressing them?
We noticed a gap in digital readiness among frontline teams. To address this, we launched targeted training programs and introduced digital tools with intuitive interfaces. As a result, adoption rates improved by 40% and error rates dropped significantly.
If you could implement one game changing innovation across all Nestlé South Asia supply chains tomorrow, what would it be—and why?
A unified AI-powered control tower that integrates demand sensing, inventory, logistics efficiencies, optimized transport, and ESG metrics. It would enable real-time decisions, reduce waste, and elevate both efficiency and responsibility.
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