“We need to be able to feed 10 billion people by 2050”
In this exclusive interview, Cécile Béliot, CEO of Bel Group, outlines the company’s mission to promote healthier, sustainable food globally
– Could you tell us about the Bel Group?
The Bel group is a French family-owned food group founded in 1865 in the Jura region of France. Today, we are a major player in food through healthy and responsible dairy, fruit and vegetable portions, and one of the world leaders in the branded cheese sector. Our portfolio of world-class brands such as The Laughing Cow, Kiri, Babybel, Boursin, Nurishh, Pom’Potes and GoGo squeeZ, as well as some thirty other local brands, have enabled us to achieve sales of €3.65 billion by 2023.
The group employs more than ten thousand people in nearly sixty subsidiaries around the world, who help to implement the group’s mission: to offer healthier and more responsible food for everyone and to work towards the development of a new food model. Bel products are produced at 30 production sites and distributed in more than 120 countries.
In 2024, we officially adopted the status of a company with a mission, formalised as follows: ‘By providing access to healthier and more sustainable food for all, we are working to develop a new food model: a model that respects the planet’s natural resources; a model that benefits our entire ecosystem from upstream agriculture to consumers; a model that allows us to act for the generations of today and those of tomorrow.’
– What are your Group’s main priorities for international development?
We’ve identified two priority growth areas – the United States, which is now our biggest market, where demand for healthy snacks is growing fast, and Asia, where our products have everything to succeed: in India, for example, our healthy, nutritious products, often sold by the portion, stand out for their accessibility. To accelerate our growth in this region, we have been manufacturing locally since 2022, as part of a joint venture with Britannia, one of India’s leading food manufacturers.
Our development is also about how we share value within the company, and in particular with our employees. This year, in 2024, we launched an employee share ownership programme in France, the United States and Canada, and soon in China. The first subscriptions have been very successful, which shows that our employees are very supportive of the Group’s strategy.
– What role does CSR play in your Group?
Over the past 20 years, the Bel group has initiated a profound transformation of its business model by placing responsibility at its heart. One step in this transformation has been to bring together the finance and CSR functions within the same Impact department. CSR therefore occupies a central place, in the literal sense of the term, since the management of the company and its performance is based on two legs, on both financial performance and social and environmental responsibility.
We also believe that our responsibility does not stop at the factory gate. Our CSR transformation aims to engage our various stakeholders, whether upstream with our dairy or fruit farming partners, or our distribution partners. We measure and monitor our scope 1, 2 and 3 objectives, beyond our core industrial activities.
– You mentioned the importance of taking small steps to make big bets. Can you give us some concrete examples of the ‘big bets’ Bel has made in the area of CSR?
We are the first generation of leaders to know, with a duty to resolutely take the decisions needed to change scale and act quickly.
The Bel group is a food company, and as such, most of our impact is linked to the impact of agricultural production, whether it’s milk (almost 70% of our carbon footprint) or, to a lesser extent, fruit. We therefore have a twofold challenge: firstly, to change eating habits towards products that have a lower carbon impact, and secondly, to change the agricultural model towards practices that are more respectful of nature, the climate and living beings.
At Group level, we have led the first revolution for a player hitherto positioned on dairy portions and cheese, by choosing to rebalance our portfolio towards more plant-based products. The acquisition of MOM in 2016 – and in particular its Pom’Potes and Materne brand fruit portions – is a major turning point in the history of the Group and its responsible development. This rebalanced portfolio will enable us to have an even greater impact on eating habits, by promoting access to healthy, more plant-based snacking.
At the same time, we are working hand in hand with our farming partners to encourage the development of sustainable farming practices, which means moving our agricultural model towards one of regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture means not just preserving, but actually improving the health of soils and their ability to host biodiversity, regulate water resources and capture carbon. To make this transition, the Group is working closely with dairy farmers, apple growers and the whole ecosystem as part of an Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture, to ensure that these practices become the norm.
– What are your CSR priorities?
We take a holistic approach to the challenges of social and environmental responsibility, in other words, we design our actions so that they have a tangible impact on reducing carbon emissions, preserving biodiversity, protecting the water cycle, natural resources and human beings.
Our priorities are to consume the resources we need, in particular water, to reduce our footprint, particularly for dairy products, to produce as sustainably as possible in our factories and, ultimately, to give every consumer the opportunity to reduce the impact of their food by offering them healthy and increasingly responsible products. Ultimately, our aim is to develop a 50/50 portfolio of dairy and fruit products.
– How did taking a long-term view of your impact influence your decisions?
Taking a long-term view has changed the nature of our interactions with our stakeholders, both internal and external. For example, our relationship and partnership with the farmers who supply us with the milk we use to make our cheeses changed radically 8 years ago. Even before Egalim, the Bel group initiated a process for co-constructing the price of milk, set on an annual basis, with its partner farmers. The aim of this agreement is to ensure fairer remuneration for milk producers, who must be able to make a living from their work (social responsibility), but also to give them visibility over their ability to invest in the ecological transition of their farms (environmental responsibility). Within 2 years, thanks to a system of premiums encouraging the introduction of sustainable practices, 100% of our dairy farming partners had adopted a 100% GMO-free cow diet and introduced minimum grazing for 150 days a year.
The long-term vision is also one that allows us to project ourselves into investments with a longer payback period. Several years ago, we decided to install a biomass boiler at our Evron plant, to replace the gas boiler that had been supplying the plant’s energy needs since it was founded. At the time of this decision, the project was certainly beneficial from an environmental point of view, but with a return on investment that could be counted in decades (17 years). This project was also made possible by our family model and our family shareholders, who were convinced of the importance of decarbonising our production to ensure the long-term future of our business. And the war in Ukraine has shown just how strategic a choice this is.
– How do you integrate CSR into the assessment of your overall performance?
We have developed a Group-wide positive impact index designed to reflect our commitment and assess our CSR performance on the basis of criteria that are defined and integrated into our mission: our environmental footprint, the commitment of our employees, our ability to offer products for everyone, the implementation of regenerative farming practices, and the commitment of our customers. Measuring our impact is not just a reporting tool; it is a genuine tool for steering the company and our investment projects. Our decisions and the day-to-day running of our operations incorporate this new understanding of our impact, at all levels of the company, which is why, in a consistent way, the bonuses of all our employees also include CSR criteria.
– What are the main difficulties you are encountering in accelerating your efforts in these areas?
The 2 main challenges will be our ability to act collectively on an economic model that is viable for everyone, from upstream to downstream, and to continue to defend the value of healthy, responsible food to the public. We need to be able to feed 10 billion people by 2050. The change of scale and the speed with which we move towards a responsible agri-food industry will be decisive.
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