The world’s largest food company is quietly redesigning the foundations of how it secures raw materials, not because of any single crisis, but because crises no longer arrive one at a time.
Eric Gorlier, Global Head of Procurement for Commodities and Sustainability at Nestlé, has navigated supply chains for more than two decades. He has managed harvest failures, geopolitical shocks, and sudden price spikes, to name only a few challenges. But in an exclusive interview with Expana, Gorlier said the current moment is qualitatively different from anything his profession has previously encountered. The defining characteristic is not the severity of any individual disruption. It is the speed and depth at which multiple disruptions are colliding with one another.
“The unique challenge we’re going through today is this element of interconnectedness,” Gorlier said.
As Gorlier prepares to speak at Expana’s Agrifood Intelligence Summit in Chicago in November 2026, his account of how Nestlé is responding to these cascading pressures offers a window into how the broader food industry can also adapt.
The real challenge, as Gorlier describes it, is often the interaction between climate, geopolitics, logistics, farmer economics and demand shifts, rather than any single factor in isolation. It is the way those factors are intersecting simultaneously and propagating across product categories at a pace that traditional procurement frameworks were never designed to handle. “If I’m just looking at key metrics related to the frequency of volatility, there are natural pointers towards more events, more interconnected events. So that is probably something that belongs to the new normal,” he said.
Cocoa, Dairy, and Grains: A New Map of Commodity Risk
For Gorlier, cocoa has been a visible illustration of this dynamic. For the past 18 to 24 months, prices have reached record highs, driven by weather-related harvest failures, and quality deterioration across producing regions. The West African cocoa belt, which accounts for most of the global cocoa supply, has proved particularly vulnerable. Unlike coffee, whose production is distributed across multiple continents and dozens of countries, cocoa remains geographically concentrated in areas where weak infrastructure and inadequate support for farming systems have prevented recovery.
Grains present a contrasting but equally instructive case. The recent escalation of the war in Ukraine has driven volatility in global grain markets, not because production has collapsed, but because logistics have been severely disrupted. The inability to reliably export grain through the Black Sea, a historic chokepoint for global agricultural trade, means that physical commodity availability does not automatically translate into procurement security. “Availability of the grains is not what is causing the volatility,” he explained. “You may have the physical commodities that you need, that doesn’t mean you’re insulated from that volatility as well.”
In dairy markets, weather stress has reduced pasture availability in key producing regions. Energy costs, elevated by Middle East geopolitical tensions, have increased production expenses for dairy operations globally. There is also an indirect relationship of surging demand for dairy-based proteins to contend with, as seen with health and wellness trends, nutritional fortification programs, and the rapid uptake of GLP-1 medications. All this is in its own way “displacing supply and demand, creating significant volatility as well,” Gorlier said.
What connects cocoa’s structural fragility, grains’ logistics crisis, and dairy’s demand revolution is that each reflects a different type of underlying risk converging on procurement simultaneously. No single hedging strategy addresses all three. “Resilience is probably becoming an overarching ambition and mission of procurement,” Gorlier said.
Climate Change as a Supply Chain Problem
Gorlier frames climate risk not as an environmental consideration but more as a supply chain emergency at its core. “Climate change is often discussed as an environmental issue,” he said. “It is actually as much a supply issue.”
The practical implications are already visible, according to Gorlier. Historical weather data, which procurement teams have traditionally used to model commodity price risk and build forecasting models, is losing its predictive reliability. Machine learning algorithms trained on past patterns are failing to forecast price levels when the magnitude of yield damage from extreme weather events exceeds anything previously recorded. “We have seen cases in extreme volatility, including coming from weather events, where our machine learning models were simply not able to predict the price level that was happening in the market because the magnitude of what was happening in terms of reduction in yields had no reference in the past,” Gorlier said.
El Niño adds another layer of complexity. “The way it impacts the different commodities is very different category to category, or within the same category may have a very different impact,” Gorlier explained.
Nestlé’s response operates across two distinct timescales, Gorlier went on to say. In the short term, the company is investing in agility, market intelligence, and financial risk management. Sourcing flexibility, the ability to quickly shift procurement to alternative origins when one is disrupted, is being built deliberately into supply chain architecture.
But long-term supply security requires making the farming systems that underpin supply chains fundamentally more robust. For instance, Nestlé is investing heavily in regenerative agriculture — an approach focused on improving soil health, preserving water resources, and building farming systems capable of sustaining economically viable yields while withstanding climate stress. Initiatives like regenerative agriculture are important not only from an environmental perspective but because they help strengthen long-term supply resilience and supply security.
Yet even this long-term investment has limitations, Gorlier conceded. Some growing regions may become genuinely unviable for specific crops within the coming decades. In his view, Nestlé must therefore plan geographically across longer time horizons, identifying where production can be sustained long-term and where new investment in alternative farming regions must begin now.
Technology and Human Judgment
Artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics allow Nestlé to connect greater numbers of signals, test more scenarios, and respond to market movements faster than previously possible. Scenario planning exercises that once required significant manual effort to produce two or three versions can now generate hundreds or thousands of possibilities rapidly.
Yet the proliferation of scenarios creates its own challenge: extracting actionable insight from vast quantities of possible futures requires human judgment that no algorithm currently replaces. Gorlier described what he demands from his teams. “I want my team to be able to collect the data, connect the data together, run as many scenarios as they want, but then use their unique knowledge of the market, of suppliers, our needs in terms of business, what matters versus maybe less, where are we the most exposed as a business to make the judgment calls on what is the right hedging strategy or the right sourcing strategy, or what change in formulation we need to have.”
Where Gorlier sees AI delivering distinct competitive value is in identifying “low signals”, what he says are small, isolated data points that might appear insignificant individually but could signal emerging disruptions when connected correctly. “What I also see as fundament is believing in low signals, those small elements,” he said. “Nobody is clever when everybody knows the storm is there. But increasingly, AI is helping us identify those small signals that if you can connect, then you may have a bit of a chance of a form of anticipation or have a chance to react sooner than the others. And this is where you can create a competitive advantage.”
To illustrate, he took the example of a vessel detected as stationary in a shipping corridor. This may be worthless information in isolation. However, combined with data on harvest conditions in the originating region, export volumes from that origin, industry inventory-to-use ratios, and the likely destination of the cargo, the same data point can inform a meaningful procurement decision. “If we can spot some of those few triggers and could connect a story they could have together, then we might be better prepared or at try to have a bit of anticipation,” Gorlier said. “That’s why I see AI as an enabler, but you need people to make judgment calls.”
Looking Ahead to 2027 and Beyond
Gorlier’s primary concern is not any single commodity or disruption. It is how multiple shocks might combine simultaneously. Climate experts are warning that the probability of a strong El Niño event is rising. If that materializes while Middle East tensions continue to elevate energy costs, and while Black Sea logistics remain constrained for grain exporters, the compounding effect across multiple commodity categories could be severe. “The biggest concern I have is actually related to how vulnerabilities will combine,” he stressed.
In the case of proteins, he said, limited processing capacity already constrains the system’s ability to absorb supply shocks. If El Niño simultaneously stresses pasture availability, Middle East tensions keep energy and production costs elevated, and grain supply disruptions raise feed costs, the pressure on protein supply chains could reach critical levels… “A combination that may be a significant element of concern,” Gorlier explained.
Rather than attempting to predict how each scenario will unfold precisely, Nestlé has committed to a different approach. “At Nestlé, we are less worried about trying to predict those shocks specifically than understanding where the system has the least room to absorb them. Knowing that, you can translate risk into action plans, and you can act,” he added.
A Redefinition of Procurement
Fifteen years ago, commodity procurement was primarily a cost optimization function. Today, as supply resilience and sustainability have become board-level priorities, procurement is increasingly recognized as a strategic function that fuels business growth. Gorlier describes the function as responsible for designing supply systems capable of sustaining business continuity through an era of perpetual disruption. “We’re moving from buying input to designing resilient supply chains,” he said. “We’re probably moving away from being measured by what we could save to what we can secure. And that’s quite different because one is about efficiencies to your business, the other one is how do you participate in business growth.”
The transformation is also attracting a different generation of professionals into commodity procurement; people drawn by the sustainability dimension and the opportunity to build systems with environmental and social impact alongside commercial value. “It is fueling an element of purpose in procurement,” he argued.
According to Gorlier, sustainability and supply chain resilience are the same priority, just expressed differently. “Sustainability is the natural thing to do to make your system more resilient. If your farms are more resilient, your farmers will be more resilient. This is making agronomy more resilient. This is making your supply chain more resilient. This is an ensuring supply improvement, which is protecting your business at the same time,” he said.
When Gorlier arrives in Chicago in November, he says the conversations he most wants to have are not necessarily the headline challenges like climate volatility, geopolitical risk, El Niño impacts, protein demand shifts, as these will be known to virtually everyone attending. What he is looking for is evidence of solutions that have moved beyond pilot projects and generated measurable impact at scale.
“What interests me is, what are we going to do beyond the diagnosis itself? What are others doing?” Gorlier said. “Which solutions have progressed the most beyond pilots? What is the experience of others?” He is equally prepared to share Nestlé’s own experience openly, including what has not worked as well as what has.
Written by Simon Duke
