Nestlé S.A.

Nestlé runs two businesses that each trap customers through different mechanisms: a coffee system where every Nespresso machine ever sold can only brew Nestlé's own aluminum capsules, and an infant formula operation where selling in any new country requires years of clinical trials and a separately certified factory that no regulator will approve in less than eighteen months. Because the capsule geometry and brewing pressure are co-engineered and patent-protected, a competitor wanting to serve Nespresso machine owners cannot just copy the capsule — it must simultaneously break the patents, rebuild the aluminum forming line, and reconstruct the recycling infrastructure as a single package, which keeps the installed base of machines a permanently captive reorder channel. The infant formula side is locked in a different way: FDA, EFSA, and China's SAMR each require their own facility certification and clinical data, so if a contamination event triggers recalls across multiple jurisdictions at once, years of non-transferable compliance work collapses and the only path back is to run the full approval process again from the start. The long-run tension in both cases is the same — the Nespresso lock depends entirely on the patents holding, and the formula business depends on staying clean inside regulatory systems that any single incident can reset.