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Grupo Bimbo is the world's largest baking company, whose purpose is to build a sustainable, highly productive, and deeply humane company. The company operates in 32 countries throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, and encompasses many familiar brands, including Oroweat, Bimbo, Tia Rosa, Sara Lee and more.
Grupo Bimbo became an Earthworm Foundation member in early 2016. The company uses palm oil and palm kernel oil in many of its baked goods, and it is committed to working to build a transparent palm oil supply chain that meets the criteria for no deforestation and no exploitation in Bimbo's Global Palm Oil Policy.
In the first half of 2018, Grupo Bimbo could trace 87% of the palm oil/palm kernel oil volume purchased for use in its products to palm oil mills in 19 different countries.
As of 2019, 40% of Grupo Bimbo's overall palm oil/palm kernel oil volume comes from direct suppliers that have a public NDPE policy equivalent to Grupo Bimbo's own policy.
In 2021, we began supporting Grupo Bimbo through the development of its Global Regenerative Agriculture Framework and restore the heath of soil.
As identified through Grupo Bimbo's traceability work, more than 60% of the company's palm oil/ palm kernel oil originates in Latin America. Given that more than 80% of global palm oil is produced in Southeast Asia, this puts Grupo Bimbo in a somewhat unusual position compared to many other global brands. When Grupo Bimbo first began engaging its direct and indirect suppliers in Latin America, many were not as familiar with the concepts and criteria around responsible sourcing, especially with regards to a "beyond certification" approach. As a result of this, Grupo Bimbo has invested time educating suppliers about No Deforestation, No Exploitation principles and has pushed suppliers to adopt policies of their own.
Recently, Grupo Bimbo has focused on the ground transformation efforts in Mexico, where smallholders dominate the palm oil industry. In partnership with Nestlé and a shared supplier, Grupo Bimbo is investing in two smallholder landscapes to prevent deforestation and other land use conversion by palm oil. In both landscapes, baseline information about current land use provided by Starling has served as the basis for stakeholder engagement. In the first landscape, Marques de Comillas, a smallholder High Carbon Stock project is now being piloted. In the second landscape, La Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve, a multi-stakeholder land use planning process is underway to support the preservation of important wetland habitat. Beyond the direct impact of these landscape-scale projects in Mexico, the goal is to generate solutions that can be used across Latin America, where smallholder palm growers play an important role in many countries.
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