Pillar #3: Product & know-how

Our commitments to make quality products for all, today and tomorrow.

At Délifrance, taste and quality are central.

We work to offer you the best products, made with the best ingredients, selected with great care and integrating sustainability criteria.

Offering products with reduced lists of ingredients and no controversial additives is also a top priority.

Moreover, everything we do is done while guaranteeing food safety rules and respecting ethical principles in our relationships with our suppliers. 

Create a sustainable wheat flour supply chain

Our commitments

Wheat flour is our main raw material. 

Thanks in particular to VIVESCIA’s vertically integrated supply chain, we can create more environmentally-friendly products, using flour from wheat grown using regenerative farming practices that preserve the soil, biodiversity and the climate by storing carbon.

Meanwhile, we have started using flour from CRC®-certified wheat for our Délifrance Héritage range of bread made in France. It ensures agricultural practices good for biodiversity, a French origin and a fair remuneration for farmers. Moreover, 100% of our wheat used in our French sites is already free from storage insecticides.

Our targets

100% sustainable wheat flour on all our sites by 2030

A sustainable sourcing of our main ingredients

Our commitments

We select our raw materials with the greatest care.
To quality criteria we also decided to add a few years ago sustainability criteria when selecting our ingredients. Our ambition is now to go further on selecting ethical and sustainable raw materials for our strategic ingredients.

We have set targets for our main strategic ingredients and will keep working to go further. We plan to focus on butter as well, by collaborating with our suppliers to reduce the carbon footprint and ensure animal welfare. We will also define a policy on responsible purchasing for all our raw materials.

 

Today:

100% cage-free eggs since 2020*

100% RSPO-certified palm oil since 2021**

40% Rainforest Alliance cocoa in 2023**

 

*Products made in our EU factories; targets: 100% of our products in 2025

**Délifrance labelled products made in our EU factories

Our targets

100% certified cocoa by the end of 2024

100% RSPO-certified and segregated palm oil by the end of 2024

Zero-deforestation in our value chains by 2025

Guarantee safe and quality products

Our commitments

We guarantee our customers the highest-quality products, that comply with food safety standards and nutritional requirements.

In line with our DNA, in which innovation is strong, we are aiming for even more quality tomorrow.

Our approach is to reduce the additives in existing products and in the development of new products.
As part of this work, we have drawn up a list of those to be eliminated as a priority. Since 2019, Délifrance teams have been carrying out in-depth work on the additives present in recipes. In 2023, the number of recipes reworked have represented 71% of Délifrance portfolio.

Our targets

Maintain GFSI certifications on all our sites

Progressive simplification of our recipes and elimination of the additives identified as priorities on our list by 2025

Respect ethical principles in our relationships with suppliers

Our commitments

Within our ecosystem, we are responsible for maintaining exemplary relationships with our suppliers and ensure the respect of human rights in all our value chain.

We have a Supplier Code of Conduct we are planning to update by 2024; our objective is to have 100% of our suppliers sign it during the same year. It will of course help us create the conditions of respect for human rights in our entire supply chain, but also share our values in terms of respect for the environment and fight against corruption.

Interview of Semra Kartal

Our Purchasing Director answers a few questions on our challenges and
priorities regarding raw materials at Délifrance:

How do you select your raw material suppliers today?

Collaboration and partnership are the foundations of our relationship with our suppliers. We are looking for suppliers that can provide the high-quality ingredients we need, with the expected technical characteristics, and who integrate sustainability criteria in their approach.

It has now been a few years that we embarked on this journey, since we launched our Go Clean programme and
we are working closely together to move forward. We prioritized our actions on eggs, cocoa and palm oil and we will soon also accelerate on a more sustainable sourcing on butter and flour which are our two main raw materials.

 

What are the challenges that you face?

The economic outlook after these last 2 years of crisis has set new challenges. The war in Ukraine is exacerbating the impact on energy prices, inflation and growth, resulting in upward pressures on commodity prices, renewed supply disruptions and increasing uncertainty. This has significant impact on our sourcing & supply capacity.

Main consequence being the availability of the raw materials on immediate and long term. It is difficult to predict the long-term outcome, but all elements suggest that raw materials will be more and more subject to availability constraints (climate change, global demand increase…)

In that particular context finding suppliers aligned with our ambitions and with strong commitments on sustainability, animal welfare or carbon footprint reduction can be a challenge. In the meantime, it will be key criteria to guarantee the sustainable supply over the next years; all actors need to support this development.

We have rightly observed that CSR policy is now included in many suppliers’ practices and strategy with a very transparent approach on their actions and roadmaps.

 

What will your next months’ priorities be?

We know that ingredients have a big impact on our overall carbon footprint and we will focus on building our roadmap for sustainable flour and butter. More generally speaking we will also write a Sustainable Sourcing Charter to make sure that sustainable sourcing is part of our culture to preserve the planet's resources as much as possible and have a positive impact on communities.

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