SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Sustainability has many faces.

 

We have been dedicated to sustainability for decades and focus on limiting our use of resources as far as possible and operating efficiently during our daily work. We do not, however, believe that sustainability should be limited to ecology or climate protection: in this respect, values associated with the greater good such as dignity, solidarity and justice are also a fixed part of the social values supported by Gunz.

Climate protection

Human dignity

Solidarity

Justice

CLIMATE PROTECTION

Our key goal in this area: preventing the use of unnecessary resources. This is an area in which we have always led by example; from the latest buildings, systems and machinery to our economical vehicle fleet.

In recent years, we have invested in a variety of other sustainable measures:

  • Conversion of all our lighting in Mäder (AT) and Magdeburg (GER) to LED → 80 percent saving in lighting energy
  • Heating in Mäder (AT) with biogas produced at a local composting plant; conversion to a heat pump in 2022, as in Magdeburg (GER)
  • Electrically-operated forklift truck; current conversion to energy-saving lithium-ion technology
  • A photovoltaic power plant at our location in Mäder (AT) covers half of our requirement for energy, in Magdeburg (GER) twice as much; we only purchase green electricity; surpluses are fed into the public energy grid
  • State-of-the-art stretch films to secure loads → avoidance of 100 tonnes of plastic waste per year
  • We mainly organise our own transport services; this and other measures, such as the optimum utilisation of pallets, avoids thousands of HGV journeys

We have been partners of “turn to zero” for several years and are acknowledged as a company with climate-neutral locations.
Despite every effort, it is not possible to entirely prevent emissions of CO2. We therefore offset our emissions with high-quality climate certificates and are 100 percent CO2-neutral:
We recently offset the unavoidable CO2 emissions from our “turn to zero” balance by partaking in the following climate protection projects:

We are very proud to be able to be part of these excellent projects.

HUMAN DIGNITY & FAIRTRADE

We do not consider fair trade to be a marketing project, but part of our family philosophy.

Unfortunately, cocoa farming is the weakest link in the supply chain. We take the view that hard work of this kind should be fairly rewarded, however, so in 2017, we decided to enter into a partnership with Fairtrade Austria. At that time, we set ourselves the goal of switching our entire range of pralines and chocolates to Fairtrade cocoa. Two years later, it was time for us to take the next step: we converted 200 of our products, and 15 different suppliers across Europe were convinced by our decision. With the full conversion of our range of pralines and chocolates to Fairtrade cocoa, we therefore became the biggest partner of Fairtrade Austria in this area.

With the marketing of our products in more than 100 countries worldwide, the Fairtrade logo is shown on 40 million packets each year. In this way, many people hear about Fairtrade for the first time. We are pleased that Fairtrade recognises us as an important ambassador in this context.

We pay the additional costs of roughly 1 million euros per year. We do not want to pass the extra cost of our products onto our customers, though. We would much rather set an example in this area for a sense of responsibility and fairness.

Cocoa farmer at work

SOLIDARITY & JUSTICE

Girl from the school home paints a picture

Our Gunz Solidarity Fund is endowed with 100,000 euros per year. We primarily provide support to employees who find themselves in harsh personal circumstances. We donate the money that we don’t spend within our company to social welfare organisations.

One of our long-standing partners is the Schulheim Mäder, a day school and therapy centre for children who suffer from disabilities. We also support organisations in Vorarlberg which provide help to people and families in need.

We also donate products to the Vorarlberg organisation “Tischlein Deck Dich”, which distributes food to people in need at no cost.