VEVEY, Switzerland: In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week, Nestle's Chief Executive Mark Schneider said the world's largest food group will have to raise the prices of its food products this year to offset higher production costs.

"The increases will not be as steep as they were in 2022, but we have some catching up to do over the full year," Schneider added, as quoted by the Associated Press.

In the first nine months of 2022, Nestle, the manufacturer of KitKat chocolate bars and Nescafe, reported sales growth of 8.5 percent, of which price rises accounted for 7.5 percentage points.

Driven largely by rising food and energy prices, inflation in many developed economies has been running at multi-decade highs.