ZURICH, Switzerland – Barry Callebaut is launching a new initiative to map out ways to reduce its carbon emissions from road transportation by up to 30%. Not only does this save on transport costs, this reduction represents a significant milestone on Barry Callebaut’s journey to achieve its Forever Chocolate target of being carbon positive by 2025, says the company on its website.
This year, Jakub Ferenc, Norderstedt Plant Manager, embarked on an ambitious task to collect data on Barry Callebaut’s distribution activity by road across Region EMEA.
This essentially meant capturing 70,000 individual delivery routes in some 3,000 combinations. The analysis highlighted significant potential to reduce carbon emissions, whilst improving production efficiency and customer satisfaction along the way.
Reducing emissions from road transportation
A dedicated team of Barry Callebaut employees from supply chain, production planning and customer care, are now in the process of defining concrete solutions for feasibility testing. The two key areas of focus are – load and production optimization.
Load optimization is essentially about the transportation of liquid chocolate. Ensuring trucks are adequately filled and travelling more efficient distances to customers has a potential emission reduction of up to 16%.
A further contribution to reduce carbon emissions is the increased use of multi-chamber trucks. These vehicles can combine different types of chocolate, e.g. milk and dark together in one efficient delivery, and eliminate the need for many of the smaller deliveries through a so-called “milk round” approach.
Benefits for the customers
Concentrating the number of chocolate deliveries involves less resource investment for the customer and delivering over shorter distances can lower storage costs and enable shorter-term ordering. This can be a crucial factor to commercial success for FMCG customers needing to respond to the relative spontaneity of the retail supply chain.
Moving forward
Jakub Ferenc anticipates that the company’s ambitious emission reduction targets could be a reality in three to five years from now. This reduction target represents a meaningful milestone on the journey to meeting Barry Callebaut’s overall objective of being carbon and forest positive by 2025.
Forever Chocolate
Forever Chocolate is Barry Callebaut’s plan to make sustainable chocolate the norm by 2025 to help ensure future supplies of cocoa and improve farmer livelihoods. It supports the Cocoa Horizons Foundation in its goal to shape a sustainable cocoa and chocolate future.
