It’s our responsibility!
As a medium-sized company, at Conditorei Coppenrath & Wiese we recognise our responsibility - not only for the people who work alongside us, but also for society and the environment. To meet this commitment, we have spent the past 15 years working intensively towards continuing to reduce the effects of our products and services on the environment. Our goal never changes: to give the next generation the same possibilities in life that we enjoy today - this is how we define sustainability.
Put in more concrete terms, this means that we create a pleasant working environment for our employees, know the precise origins of our raw materials and ensure as little produce is wasted as possible.
A sustainable approach can never consist of short-term, individual measures. Instead, it is a lasting process, brought to life by the company as a whole, from management right through to our apprentices.
Our achievements indicate that we are on the right track. In fact, our commitment towards sustainability was recognised in the 2014 Sustainability Image Score (SIS) study, where we were ranked amongst the top ten companies.
Even when sustainable management means making technical and organisational changes to the company there is one main point to remember: it is people, our employees and their families, the local region and our customers and suppliers who are always at the heart of everything we do.
Top quality, long-term partnerships and short delivery routes:
Our commitment to working sustainably begins when we purchase our raw materials.
Regional ingredients:
Our most significant ingredients include milk, dairy products, flour, eggs and fruits.
We currently procure around 60% of our raw materials, excluding fruits, from the region.
This shortens transportation routes and allows our buyers to conduct regular on-site visits so they can inspect the produce and production processes.
We are also committed to ensuring that our suppliers work under fair conditions and that the cultivation of our raw materials has the smallest possible impact on the environment.
- The majority of our milk is sourced from neighbouring dairy farms.
- We exclusively use flour produced under controlled, integrated cultivation.
- Most of the 60–80 tonnes of apples that we work through each day are grown either in the region around Lake Constance or in the "Old Country" near Hamburg, an area in which apple production is a centuries-old tradition.
Sustainably cultivated ingredients: certified palm oil at Coppenrath & Wiese
Some raw materials simply aren't available locally. One example of this is palm oil which is predominantly sourced in Indonesia or Malaysia. We passed RSPO certification in 2013, ensuring that if some of our produce has to travel a great distance, it has been grown in the most environmentally friendly manner possible. The RSPO (Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil) organisation is committed to the sustainable cultivation of palm oil worldwide and can assess each and every stage of the supply chain for certification. Within the framework of our produce management, we always test alternative raw materials to minimise the use of ingredients containing palm oil.
For the sake of our environment: Decreasing energy consumption - reduced emissions -
In the context of our extensive program Conditions (an acronym for Conditorei-Instandhaltungs-, Optimierungs- und Nachhaltigkeits-System; Pastry bakery maintenance, optimisation and sustainability system) we have been keeping a close and critical eye on our production procedures and resource consumption since 2007.
Conditions is a focus of our continuous process of improvement.
Our employees use classic TPM (Total Productive Management) tools for analysis and evaluation of the processes so as to derive potential improvements. All technical sequences and procedures in our company are assigned to one of the eight categories of the Conditions program. Our experts analyse them and develop solutions to further decrease the energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
Environmentally friendly energy generation is a crucial part of an even more resource-efficient production. At Coppenrath & Wiese we have continuously improved our heat recovery capacity. Today more than 80 percent of the hot water we use is generated through heat recovery. By 2018, we hope to further improve these numbers. As early as 2010 we acquired an environmental management system in accordance with DIN ISO 14001, which improves transparency and helps us identify additional areas with energy saving potential.
Intelligent energy use: Our office building in Mettingen
The new building in Mettingen, which was completed and taken into use in April 2013, is a milestone of energy efficiency. After years of planning with a particular focus on functionality and energy efficiency, we constructed a new office building and modern visitor centre. The Coppenrath & Wiese computing centre is also integrated in the new building. 100 percent of the heating energy required for the new spaces and offices is generated using heat recovery from the refrigerating systems used in production. In the computing centre, the waste heat of the mainframe computers is used for heating the engineering spaces and adjacent rooms.
Careful production processes for the best quality confectionery
Produced in house, down to the finest detail:
Our bakery is well known for carrying out the majority of its production in house. This includes processes such as preparing fruit fillings. Not only does this guarantee a consistently high quality, but it also avoids additional emissions from unnecessary transport between different production sites.
Careful processing:
To make the products as natural as possible, we constantly test and improve all of our production processes so that our raw materials are processed carefully. For example, our bread rolls are given sufficient time to prove and to rise. We also don't add any leavening agent and instead follow the traditional method for making goods from yeast dough. This results in bread rolls that actually taste of bread!
Saving raw materials by producing our own apple purée
Being sustainable also involves constantly striving to get the most out of our raw produce. An extension to our apple peeling machine means that we now use 95% of our cooking apples, reducing peel waste from 25% to 5%. This means that for every 1,000 kg of cooking apples, we get approximately 750 kg of apple segments or cubes and around 200 kg of apple purée.
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GreenPalm SUSTAINABILITY
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Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
