At Puratos, we recognize our responsibility to help build a more sustainable food system. To translate this responsibility into tangible actions, in 2020, we committed to sourcing 100% cage-free eggs globally by the end of 2025.
At present, while we have successfully reduced our overall dependency on eggs and helped many customers do the same through our egg-reduction solutions, we will not succeed in completing the transition of our portfolio to cage-free sourcing within the deadline we have set for ourselves.
In hindsight, we acknowledge that our original ambition didn’t properly take into account the complexity and global scope of our operations. The path has been more challenging than we anticipated. Global avian flu outbreaks, regional supply shortages, and varying customer willingness to share the additional cost of cage-free eggs have all slowed progress.
With this in mind, we are revising our plans to adapt them to the current market conditions and reflect the reality of our operations. A detailed overview of the revamped plans will be published in the Annual Report 2025; in the meantime, here are the main elements.
- We remain committed to the transition to cage-free eggs, both in our own operations and by pushing our own value chain doing the same.
- While guaranteeing continuity of our operations and marketability of our products, we will continue working on three main pillars:
- Our procurement teams will keep working with our suppliers’ base to find and use cage free egg suppliers and favour those over conventional eggs.
- Our R&D teams will keep working on our recipes to keep reducing our overall dependency on eggs and find equivalent functional ingredients.
- Our business development teams will keep working to increase the global adoption of egg replacing solutions in customer recipes.
- We will continue transparently reporting our progress. The revamped commitment and KPIs reporting will be detailed around the three above pillars and will be divided into two main geographical scopes, i.e. the EU and the Rest of the World.
- The scope of the revamped commitment will be clearly split between our own standard range products, for which we can commit to a specific timeline for each geography, and the customers’ tailor-made formulas, for which we will routinely offer a cage-free sourcing, but timeline will be defined in partnership with the customers.
- We will maintain a 100% cage-free sourcing in all markets where we have already completed the transition, e.g. France, Spain, Poland, ….
