On the road to cutting CO2 emissions
On the road to cutting CO2 emissions
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 - how can we do it?
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 our customers
These Forever Chocolate driven initiatives also focus on ensuring that the customer remains at the center of the Barry Callebaut universe. 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. The present and future of this comprehensive logistics program prove that, when it comes to the environment, it’s quite literally everyone’s business.
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.
