Nestlé York
Welcome to the headquarters of Nestlé UK and Ireland
Our presence in York dates back to 1860 when the Rowntree family purchased land to build a factory.
The Rowntree family started their cocoa business in York with a small cocoa drinking product and changed the way Britons ate chocolate forever. The 1930s were the golden age of confectionery manufacturing for the factory with the invention of iconic confectionery like KitKat, Aero, Smarties, Milkybar, Black Magic, Rolo and Dairy Box.
Today, the site sits on Haxby Road and is a multifaceted hub housing a 24/7, 364 days a year operations confectionery factory, offices, a distribution warehouse for the north of the UK, Cereal Partners Worldwide Research and Development Centre, and the Nestlé Product Technology Centre (NPTC), serving as Nestlé’s global centre of excellence for R&D in chocolate, sugar confectionery and biscuits.
Yorkie
Polo
Aero
The York factory can produce more than 3,000 KitKat bars a minute, totalling to more than 4 million bars in a day.
Our workforce
At Nestlé York, our people are collaborative, innovative and looking to challenge and drive change. The Nestlé York site employee a dedicated workforce across its multifaceted hub of around 2,000 employees, including apprentices, graduates and placement students, from more than 30 nationalities, making it the largest private employer in the city of York.
In the UK and Ireland, we typically employ 180-200 apprentices across the business at any given time and recruit around 30-40 graduates every September. Our Nestlé Academy schemes offer aspiring professionals the chance to launch their career, retrain their skills, and gain real on-the-job experience, you can find more information here.
With around two-thirds of our UK and Ireland workforce dedicated to Operations, we know our brands are in great hands in our factories. Nestlé nurtures and supports its Women in Operations employee network, an initiative and area of focus for our business as we aim to improve opportunities for women to get into manufacturing and engineering roles and, furthermore, provide mentorship and support so their careers can flourish.
Roles at York
We have various roles that form our dedicated team at York, ultimately contributing to our success.
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Administrative Our Administrative professionals are highly organised, skilled in managing various tasks, and are essential to ensure smooth operations. -
Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Corporate Affairs and Sustainability handle strategic communications, stakeholder engagement and manage our sustainability initiatives. -
Finance Our Finance team focuses on driving financial performance whilst also seeking efficiency through further digitalisation. -
Legal Our Legal team deliver a trusted and credible legal service and have a seat within every critical area of our business.
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Engineering Our Engineering team ensures the smooth operation and maintenance of our facilities and equipment. -
Human Resources Human Resources play a crucial role in recruiting, developing, and supporting our talented workforce. -
Marketing Our Marketing team build our super brands, create compelling campaigns, and look after our products. -
Information Technology The Information Technology team keeps us connected, secure and safe in our digital world.
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Science, Research and Development Our Science, Research and Development teams are committed to developing innovative foods, beverages, and nutritional health solutions. -
Manufacturing and Production Manufacturing and Production have a strong focus on safety, quality, sustainability and manufacturing excellence. -
Sales and Retail Our Sales team handle category and shopper management, customer relationships, route to market strategies, field sales activities, and our customer-facing supply chains. -
Supply Chain and Procurement Our Supply Chain professionals play a critical role in ensuring quality products reach our customers and consumers, collaborating to develop the demand forecast and working to ensure we responsibly source materials.
Making a positive difference
As one of Nestle UK and Ireland’s three distribution centres, Nestlé York is working on transforming the logistics network to become more sustainable. In addition to the introduction of electric HGV trucks, the site also replaced 11 trucks with Bio-LNG, a liquified gas, and introduced trucks which run on HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) which means the Nestlé owned fleet is fully run on alternative fuels.
Through a partnership with First Milk, a British farmer-owned dairy cooperative, we work closely with farms in South Ayrshire, receiving approximately 6-7% of the area’s milk to supply the Nestlé Girvan factory, before being used in the production of chocolate at Nestlé York. Our goal, and that of First Milk, is to lessen environmental impact by improving the sustainability and efficiency of the supply chain. This means each farmer who supplies the milk for our chocolate manufacturing receives a ’sustainability bonus’ for taking practical measures that protect and enhance natural assets on their land. Read more here.
We also support initiatives like the Landscape Enterprise Networks programme in Yorkshire and the East of England, which brings together farmers, experts and businesses to organise the buying and selling of nature-based solutions. These can include water quality management, flood risk mitigation, the resilient supply of crops, GHG emissions reductions and improved biodiversity. We are participating particularly for wheat production.
We make enough chocolate here in York each year to fill an Olympic size swimming pool 37 times.
Nestlé York is proud to support local groups and events in the community
Not least through the two-day volunteering allowance each employee is encouraged to take– which would equate to approximately 120,000 hours of volunteering a year which many will chose to take locally.
From hosting career insight days with social enterprise WildHearts, to working with York Cares to support local sustainability projects and social connection events, or partnering with PhunkyFoods to support local schools with engaging education on healthy eating and lifestyles.
Confectionery and packaging
Nestle's vision is that none of its packaging ends up in landfill or as litter.
In the UK and Ireland, efforts continue at pace to ensure as close to 100% of Nestlé packaging is designed for recycling by 2025, and we continue to work towards all of our packaging being recyclable or reusable.
In 2021, the Nestlé Product Technology Centre in York, in collaboration with packaging experts at the Swiss-based Institute of Packaging Sciences, worked to innovate the packaging design of confectionery brand Smarties. Smarties became the first global confectionery brand to move to sustainably sourced and recyclable paper packaging, removing approximately 250 million plastic packs sold worldwide every year.
In 2022, KitKat packaging moved to 80% recycled plastic wrappers which can be recycled at stores across the UK. In addition, Quality Street replaced the double layer of foil and cellulose packaging and moved to recyclable paper packaging for its twist-wrapped sweets. This collective transition eliminated more than three billion pieces of packaging from our supply chain. Read more about these moves here.
Sourcing our cocoa
Advancing regenerative agriculture at scale is one of Nestlé’s key objectives of its net zero roadmap to help source its ingredients sustainably in the future, aiming to improve soil health, sequester carbon, support food security and improve resilience of farming communities, restore water resources and enable biodiversity.
In 2009, we launched the Nestlé Cocoa Plan to build on three pillars: better farming, better lives, and better cocoa. In the UK and Ireland, Nestlé has achieved 100% certified sustainable cocoa since 2015. This commitment guarantees that the cocoa used in Nestlé confectionery is sourced from farmers practicing sustainable farming.
From June 2024, all cocoa ingredients used in UK-manufactured chocolate products, including KitKat, Aero, and Yorkie produced at our York site, are fully traceable back to farm, sourced from cocoa farming families engaged in the Nestlé Income Accelerator Programme of the Nestlé Cocoa Plan. The Income Accelerator Programme aims to improve the quality of life for cocoa farming families.
Over the last decade, Nestlé has invested over £800 million in the UK. These investments have improved manufacturing efficiency and future-proofed the business for long-term growth, particularly £29.4 million was invested in Nestlé’s confectionery sites, York and Halifax, to install new machinery to increase volume.
