Millions of professionals get through their workdays with plenty of cups of —yet most don’t visit the office machine more frequently than the CEO .
The head of the $259 billion Swiss food conglomerate disclosed he consumes seven or eight cups of coffee daily.
“Just black. Sometimes with a KitKat,” Navratil The New York Times. It’s become such a regular part of his workday that he describes an espresso as “a snack for me,” noting he has no set time to stop consuming caffeine.
While this Gen Xer relies on coffee to drive his major company turnaround initiative—consuming roughly three times as much as the average American who pours daily—Gen Z is the one who truly keeps him alert, encouraging him to keep growing in his position. Otherwise, he might as well leave.
Nestlé’s youngest employees taught him to “keep learning constantly,” Navratil confessed to the NYT. “When you stop learning, that’s the time to move on to a different job.”
Navratil is part of a vocal group of business leaders—including executives from and —who claim Gen Z workers are pushing them to improve. Leaders are pushing back against the idea that young digital natives are unmotivated and overly demanding at work. Instead, Gen Zers are entering their roles with new ideas and an open way of thinking, while shaping the future of work.
Nestlé did not immediately reply to ’s request for a statement.
Navratil’s rise to the top of the food and beverage world
Although just thinking about drinking eight coffees a day might make someone feel heart palpitations, caffeine has been a key part of Navratil’s career progression.
Navratil last September, having spent his entire 20-year career at the food giant. After getting his MBA in Switzerland in 2001, Navratil started at Nestlé as an auditor. Over the following 23 years, he advanced to multiple leadership roles in Panama, Honduras, and Mexico before taking on the Nespresso CEO position in 2024. Just one year later, he became the head of the entire Nestlé operation, which includes famous brands like , Nescafé, and .
After years of , the company’s stock price is almost half of its 2022 high. Just last February, the packaged foods firm its weakest annual organic sales growth in over 25 years, due to consumers reducing their spending. And for the first nine months of 2025, Nestlé’s dropped 1.9% to about $82.8 billion, compared to the same time in 2024.
This slow progress led Navratil to make some difficult decisions. Within a month of taking over, Nestlé 12,000 white-collar positions and 4,000 manufacturing and supply chain roles, cutting its global workforce by 6% over the next two years. The company stated in that some office jobs will be automated as Nestlé aims for “operational efficiency.”
“This work method will clearly need fewer people, but it will also make the company faster,” Navratil told The New York Times. “It will be a growth story about how we use AI to grow quicker, make better decisions, and plan across the supply chain to reduce stock and waste.”
Gen Z employees are pushing their bosses to ‘do things differently’
Navratil isn’t the only business leader who benefits from young workers.
The chief human resources officer at giant , Sally Massey, that Gen Z doesn’t only bring high standards and chaos to the workplace.
The CHRO praised her young employees as ambitious and extremely tech-savvy—key skills the legacy company is looking for in talent. To absorb all their new skills, the company’s senior leaders are making a deliberate effort to listen to entry-level staff, sharing ideas across levels and generations to develop the best possible action plan.
“[Gen Z] have grown up surrounded by technology. They’ve developed in a very different way than some other generations in the company,” Massey . “They bring new ideas, new viewpoints, curiosity…They’re pushing us to improve and do things differently—I think that’s wonderful.”
Stripe’s head of data and AI, Emily Glassberg Sands, also shared that she’s focused on hiring to work at the financial services firm. The executive highlighted Gen Z for being tech-savvy and raising the bar on what can be accomplished at the company.
“I’m actually hiring more recent graduates—right now, most are new PhD graduates—but more than ever before,” Glassberg Sands said on the Forward Future. “Because they have state-of-the-art skills, they bring fresh ideas, they know how to think critically, and they’re proficient with the latest tools.”