Global bakery business
Zeelandia targets
100% sustainable palm oil
Royal Zeelandia Group has set a target of achieving 100% sustainable palm oil in a recent case study published in the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature.
Palm oil is the world’s most traded vegetable oil, widely used as a cooking oil and in the manufacturing of many products, such as spreads for toast and lipstick. But irresponsible production can cause deforestation of tropical forests and threaten wildlife such as orangutans, elephants and tigers.
That’s why Zeelandia participate in the Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard and have made an ongoing commitment to use sustainable segregated palm oil in all of their products.
Globally Zeelandia Group has operations in over 30 countries and sales in about 100 countries and is renowned for tailoring products to local tastes and needs and for setting bakery trends. It was founded in 1900 by the Dutch Doeleman family and is still headquartered in Zierikzee, Netherlands.
In the past two years, the leading baking ingredients company has worked closely with over 34 suppliers to convert 81 ingredients to use sustainable palm oil, reaching 99% usage. David Amos, Managing Director of Zeelandia UK says that they are committed to going further.
“Having converted most of the palm-based ingredients we buy in Europe to Segregated, we will enlarge our scope of activities to the Zeelandia companies outside Europe, quantifying and assessing the volume of palm oil used by these subsidiaries and joint ventures.
“We also recognise that as a leading global baking ingredients company we have a responsibility to educate others in the supply chain to work more sustainably and also look to support projects that help local communities adopt more sustainable practices and ingredients.”
Alongside its palm oil efforts, Zeelandia has worked in partnership with WWF for the past 30 years, selling organic multigrain Panda Bread to European bakeries with €0.05 of each loaf donated to the charity.
Since the partnership began, over €4.2 million has been raised for projects helping to protect natural habitats and animal and plant conservation.
In the UK, Zeelandia focuses on providing the highest quality bakery ingredients to the industrial, craft and in-store bakery sectors, and has recently moved from its previous site in Billericay, Essex to benefit from the closer proximity to the ports of Harwich and Felixstowe.
To learn more about Zeelandia’s sustainable palm oil efforts, visit https://palmoilscorecard.panda.org/scores/casestudy/zeelandia
