Respect is an important value in our company.
Respect for others of course, but also for our beautiful planet. That’s why we strive to use energy, water, food ingredients and packaging in the most efficient way and try to keep waste and emissions to a minimum.
Reducing waste
Our aim is to minimise waste and food loss whilst maximising the efficient use of natural resources throughout our operations.
Packaging waste reduction starts by optimising the product packaging at the design phase. Our designers aim to minimise weight and wasted space without jeopardising the food safety of our products whilst also maintaining robustness throughout the supply chain.
As part of our waste reduction process we look to work with our suppliers on ways of minimising packaging of our ingredients. For example as a standard we regularly review the feasibility of using bulk deliveries instead of ingredients being supplied in individual bags.
Emissions from production
We aim to significantly reduce our energy consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases. We have introduced a comprehensive set of technical measures, such as better insulation of buildings, best-in-class ammonia-cooling technology, as well as heat recuperation on cooling and compressed air installations. We are making a gradual shift to 100% LED lighting in our factories and warehouses. And by 2020 100% of the electricity we buy will be from renewable sources.
In order to significantly reduce our water consumption and wastewater discharge we have invested in measures such as dry-cleaning techniques and automated drains on cooling towers. We managed to reduce wastewater discharge by 20% from 2010 to 2015.
Reducing emissions from transport
One of the main ways we are looking to reduce emissions from our distribution activities is by improving the fuel efficiency of our vehicles. To this end we use a wide variety of technologies and systems, such as efficient route-planning, automated gear-changing, automatic start-stop controls, cylinder deactivation, auxiliary power units (gasoline and electricity), and special training in fuel-efficient driving for our drivers.
Palletisation software optimises the configuration of pallets which helps improve the efficiency when loading our trucks.
Our eco-indicators
Every production facility in our company measures its environmental performance using six eco-indicators: energy consumption, related CO2 emissions, water usage, wastewater discharge, organic load on wastewater and non-sorted solid waste. Those are the basis for continuous improvements to further reduce environmental impacts.