Bauli Group publishes its second Sustainability Report

Verona, November 21, 2023 – Bauli Group has published its second Sustainability Report, a document that sets out the passion, values and commitment the Group dedicates to protecting the environment, controlling the supply chain, improving product quality, and caring for its people and the communities in which it operates.

Despite the growing challenges that continue to affect entire sectors of the economy, the company has worked constantly to strengthen its way of doing business in order to lead not only in its own industry but also on sustainability issues, by continually improving the Group’s environmental and social performance.

The Report can be found on the Bauli Group website: https://www.bauligroup.com/en/sustainability-report/

Governance

At the beginning of 2023, the Bauli family, with 80 of its collaborators from around the world, decided to identify the Group’s new Values in an initiative coinciding with the arrival of the new CEO, Fabio di Gianmarco. The six values that will guide Bauli Group in its future growth are Goodness, Passion, Collaboration, Courage, Care and Integrity.

In 2023, Bauli devised its ‘ONE BAULI’ strategy not only to consolidate its roots and its people’s sense of community through centralised co-ordination, but also to strengthen its operations on national and international markets. Bauli Group’s corporate governance model is designed to foster harmonious collaboration between its various components and guarantee a responsible and transparent approach to managing the business, all in the pursuit of creating value for its internal and external stakeholders.

Products

Over the years, the Group has widened and enriched its range of festive products with other baked goods, both sweet and savoury, and for everyday consumption.  The common denominator is high-quality recipes based on sourdough, raw materials selected from certified sources and rigorous process control systems. Bauli continues its strategy of diversifying business lines to accompany consumers throughout the day, from breakfast and sweet or savoury snacks to main meals. Thanks to constant monitoring of eating trends, Bauli is able to capture and read the needs of consumers who are increasingly focused on wellbeing. To properly co-ordinate these new additions to the range, in 2022 it created a new Health & Wellbeing Business Unit that manages the development of products with special health & wellbeing characteristics.

Employees

Bauli Group firmly believes in its team of impassioned, capable and expert people and continues to work to attract new talent by offering constant growth and support in terms of wellbeing and quality of life, and by working to develop a company that has built on its long-established brands to become the Group it is today.

This is why the Group will continue to organise initiatives designed to improve its employees’ wellbeing and achieve the right work-life balance. It is constantly extending its corporate welfare services and initiatives, as well as its increasingly effective and personalised training and development programmes. And it has partnered with Great Place To Work to develop an employer branding process and a quality working environment.

Occupational Health and Safety has always been a strategic priority for Bauli. In 2023, the Group launched Safety-First, a project that will define a shared strategic approach to creating a cultural context in which attention to safety is perfectly assimilated in all the company’s sites worldwide. With this in mind, the Group defined the “Road to Zero Accidents”, a process to embed safety in all sites through the key drivers of communication, awareness-raising and training.

Communities

Of the various initiatives for local communities, the support given for over three years now to the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona Foundation, the oldest active library in the world, is a source of great pride for the Group. In setting up the Biblioteca Capitolare Foundation, the Group is helping to upgrade the library and promote its treasures.

Environment

Bauli Group’s commitment to reducing environmental impacts has produced some major results. The Group has reduced climate changing emissions by over 2,854 tonnes of CO2 in the last two years thanks to continuous investments in energy efficiency and the use of energy from renewable sources, which now account for 12% of total electricity consumption.

• Energy consumption

The company was a pioneering adopter of energy saving solutions such as cogeneration, trigeneration and photovoltaic systems and will shortly be adopting an energy management system certified according to UNI EN ISO 50001. Other examples include the two photovoltaic plants built last year, one at Altopascio and the other at Baramati (India), with a total installed capacity of about 1,230 kW.

The Group also constantly monitors energy consumption and efficiency parameters through an Energy Committee – made up of production facility managers and technical systems managers in its other facilities – tasked with analysing data collected from the sites and proposing improvements to invest in.

• Packaging

The company continues to invest in reducing the impact of its packaging by cutting back on the quantity of material used and choosing recyclable materials and raw materials from sustainable sources.

This year too, as it did in Easter 2022, the company offered its iconic Bauli Colomba in fully recyclable and sustainable packaging, with an all-cardboard outer box and an inner baking case containing the Colomba made from compostable material.

The packaging of many of the Group’s products has been upgraded to single-material, either paper or plastic, enabling total recyclability and cutting out unsorted waste in line with circular economy principles.

Bauli uses recycled paper for 97% of its total paper and cardboard packaging and is studying innovative ways to replace the remaining 3% that requires the use of virgin paper to comply with the law.

• Water

Bauli is committed to promoting responsible use of water and to this end has adopted a water recovery system that exploits the thermal gradient principle in an adiabatic cooling tower to recover and reuse water in its production processes.

• Waste

Bauli is strongly focused on correct waste disposal and prioritises the reduction of packaging waste, measures to upgrade reusability and recyclability, and efficient management of recyclable materials to safeguard natural resources. In 2022-2023, the Group’s waste production was 12% down on the previous year. Bauli’s waste management priority is prevention, followed by recovery operations that avoid sending waste to disposal. Disposal was avoided for 87% of total waste, of which 55% was recycled and 32% was used for recovery.

All its facilities have a waste sorting station and all work areas in these facilities have special waste bins with disposal codes. Most of the packaging is recyclable and offices have been sorting their waste for years. Lastly, food waste goes to the animal feed industry in line with circular economy principles. The company has also begun a campaign to eliminate single-use plastic and reduce waste at all its sites.

• Logistics and transport

Bauli Group is committed to optimising the distances its vehicles travel and how full they are by using advanced software to rationalise its transportation.

Last year, more than 52,000 no-load kilometres were avoided thanks to input flow management, while CO2 emissions were reduced by around 900 tonnes against around 700 tonnes in 2021/2022. The company constantly monitors outbound logistics flows using advanced software that measures the environmental impact of all its vehicles and considers alternative and more sustainable transport solutions, such as intermodal transport (rail or sea), which continues to experience growth. In selecting its suppliers, the company privileges those that use Euro 6 type or LNG vehicles.

Aware that it is only at the beginning of a challenging journey, but also fully confident in the capabilities of its people, Bauli is committed to building a company that can offer consumers delicious products, while also caring for its people and the Planet and sharing its traditions with the rest of the world.