There's always room to be healthier

Journalist: Tabea von Ow | Photographer: Christian Grund

Ms Mohl, so tell us, how many food supplements and vitamins do you take every day?
I like to switch between our different brands to try everything, so the number always changes a little. But I’ll try to count how many I take. After sport, I use hydration, I enrich my tea with collagen, then I take about eight tablets: multivitamin, omega-3, vitamin D, probiotics, something for cellular health, calcium, magnesium and an immune supplement. So that’s around eight pills, one tablet and one powder every day. As you can see, I walk the talk!

This makes you a great ambassador for your company. But do you believe that anyone can lead a perfectly healthy life?
‘Perfect’ is a big word. But I believe that if you pay attention to what you eat, plan a little, get informed and seek advice, you can definitely lead a healthier life, be it through diet, sleep or by strengthening your mental health. You can always be healthier. Personally, I could certainly improve a few things. But it’s also important to me that I keep adapting my health programme. Because change also keeps us healthy. 

You wear a fitness watch, so you quickly notice when something’s wrong. Why do you even need vitamins and supplements?
Sure, we use tools to collect various health data, such as blood sugar, hydration, sporting activities, lack of sleep, heart rate and much more. But we also use this data to identify gaps. We can then help with supplements or health products. I think the two things complement each other perfectly.

Are you developing specific products at Nestlé Health Science that are tailored to interact with devices like fitness watches?
Our goal is to enable consumers to live healthier lives through nutrition. We do this through innovative, science-based nutritional solutions. And we see a big opportunity to leverage digital technology in combination with these nutritional solutions.

Can you explain this in more detail?
In Japan, for example, we’ve developed a kind of health ecosystem together with Fitbit and Google. People in Japan often don’t get enough sleep and quality can be poor. This is a major problem, as lack of sleep affects performance and mental health, increases the risk of accidents, burnouts and so on. So we built the programme on three pillars. First, the person’s sleep is tracked by a Fitbit device. Second, based on the Fitbit data, the user receives simple, consumer-friendly information on how to improve their sleep. And third, we include suggestions for a nutritional supplement for better sleep from Nestlé Health Science. I think this is a great example of how technology can be combined with information and a tangible product solution to change consumer behaviour and hopefully improve their health.

I’m sure technology also plays a big part in your manufacturing...
Of course, and the use of technology is constantly increasing. For example, when we introduce certain new equipment or technology in a factory, we first develop its ‘digital twin’. This allows our employees to test the new environment and be trained on the equipment. And we can make changes based on their experience before we implement it in the real factory. These changes can include things like redesigning the equipment so that it’s more ergonomic or easier for the operator to use. However, ‘end-to-end data integration and connectivity’ has the biggest impact on our work.

What does that mean exactly?
In the past, data was tied to locations and largely stored in silos. A machine had its data, a factory had its data. With AI and increasingly affordable massive computing power, we can now bring all this data together, giving us greater accuracy and visibility – across the entire value and supply chain. We can track everything throughout the entire process, in a completely integrated way: what was made, where and when, which ingredients came from which supplier, what the expiry date is... This kind of end-to-end connectivity gives us and everyone else in the industry an advantage. It can also offer sustainability benefits: harnessing data and technology can help us optimise and use fewer resources like water, electricity and plastic. This also benefits our customers and our employees.

Do you also use robots?
We use ‘cobots’ in the production of some of our liquid food supplements. These are basically robots that work together with people and support them. This new generation of automation is much more flexible. 

In what way?
In the past, these types of equipment could only perform one task. Today, we can use them for different tasks in different production lines. On top of that, they sense a person’s movements and respond to them. They’re like a pair of helping hands alongside the workers. They’re currently helping us with packaging, for example.

Do you still need people in your factories if robots can take on so many tasks?
Technology doesn’t replace people. It simply changes the way they work. The robots take over monotonous, repetitive tasks for us. Instead, we can train the operators how to read and interpret the data, how to plan and adjust production. We need people to set the parameters for the machine to work with. And of course, there’s no replacing the human eyes, ears and intelligence that are needed in factories.

Which technological developments do you think will have the greatest impact on healthcare science in the future?
There are many. It will be the continued evolution of all of the tech that we use from gaining insights. Something I find very exciting is that advancing technology can help us discover new ingredients or ingredients with new benefits, which is particularly advantageous in our business. There’s also personalisation. In other words, technology will help us to really understand what each individual person needs. While we can track and monitor our health today, knowing exactly what the right health programme is for each of us or how to change our behaviours is hard. And there are scientific insights and understanding, as these also relate to clinical trials.

What do you mean by that?
During Covid, we learned that we could do virtual clinical trials and use a digital interface to open up the trial to a larger geographic area. Another benefit of using a digital interface is the ability to reach a specific patient or consumer population. There’s less room for error because the data is acquired electronically and not on paper, so you can also gather a lot more data. This will allow us to make the process of clinical trials more effective. Importantly, it lets us include patient groups that are difficult to reach and we can conduct studies across countries.

That all sounds very promising. But there are also major risks, especially in the area of data collection in the healthcare sector. What if the data is wrong? This kind of study would then be useless.
If you access public data, you have to make sure that it’s correct, of course. To do this, we have to verify it. Even when we think about some of the digital tools we’re developing. Whether it’s virtual AI coaching, nutritional advice or anything along these lines, we always have to make sure that the sources of information we use have integrity. And we take that very seriously. We have a very strict process in terms of scientific, medical and legal aspects before we publish any kind of information.