Sustainability investments fortify commercial bakeries

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Sustainability investments fortify commercial bakeries

2 Oct 2025

Maddie Lambert

Maddie Lambert is a copywriter and editor from Joplin, MO. She graduated from Missouri Southern State University with a Bachelor of Arts in English – literary studies. When she’s not poring over the magazine or lost in the pages of a new novel, you can find Maddie exploring her local bookstores, spending time with her husband, or sharing her latest literary discoveries with fellow book enthusiasts.

KANSAS CITY, MO — The word “efficiency” is tossed around like a communal frisbee, grasped by bakers, manufacturers and suppliers alike. The heightened emphasis on maximizing output and reducing costs has impacted the way businesses operate. From minimizing waste and optimizing resources to implementing advanced automation and upgrading technology, companies are revamping their processes to embrace this critical initiative.

These efforts to operate more efficiently have yielded unexpected — and radically promising — results.

The measures companies are taking to streamline operations are also enhancing sustainability beyond environmental compliance. Within multiple aspects of business, from production to packaging, a new space has formed to tackle both efficiency and conservation.

Quite simply, sustainability, in all its forms, is being seen through a new lens.

Here’s how two companies are realizing the benefits of this new era of secondary sustainability.

Water use efficiency

Thomasville, GA-based Flowers Foods focused on its water stewardship when reflecting on its baking processes and sanitation. Striving to improve water metering capabilities, the company discovered that tracking water consumption per ton of product was the key to achieving this.

“More than half of our bakeries use on-site meters to monitor water use more frequently, identify leaks more quickly and verify utility invoices,” said Margaret Ann Marsh, senior VP, safety, sustainability and environmental at Flowers Foods. “We set internal goals to reduce usage, which helps lower production costs and maximizes how we use our available water resources.”

Flowers’ Bakery of the Future program provides immediate reporting of production line conditions, enabling each facility to make adjustments in real-time. By more effectively monitoring water use and incorporating data and analysis, the company improved its tracking and helped quantify water reuse.

Heat recovery is another major area that Flowers focused on. The company captures waste heat from ovens and reuses it for ingredient tanks, pipe jackets and proof boxes, which conserves energy and reduces heating costs.

“The best way to manage waste is to not create it … Eliminating and reducing waste has benefits across the value chain, and this all benefits the environment.” — Christopher Wolfe | senior director of sustainability | Bimbo Bakeries USA

Reducing waste

Horsham, PA-based Bimbo Bakeries USA (BBU) also strives to optimize its manufacturing process to help prevent waste during development, ultimately seeking to reduce the time and energy required to push product from concept to store shelf.

“The best way to manage waste is to not create it,” said Christopher Wolfe, senior director of sustainability at BBU. “Eliminating and reducing waste has benefits across the value chain — fewer raw materials, energy, water, fuel and miles — and this all benefits the environment, including the carbon aspects. It also directly impacts the bottom line with associated cost savings.”

The global baking company sought to optimize its supply chain, and as commodity and utility costs increased, space for synergies emerged.

BBU reinforced fundamental programs, including steam trap maintenance, high-efficiency lighting and motors, and low-water-flow appliances. These initiatives reduced the company’s resource consumption, minimized its environmental impact and lowered operational costs.

But it didn’t stop there.

“We’ve embraced renewables, real-time monitoring and emerging technologies like AI,” Wolfe said.

With AI, commercial bakers and equipment manufacturers can monitor energy usage across production lines, identify inefficiencies, and recommend improvements or automatically adjust processes to minimize energy consumption. For ingredient suppliers, AI can improve supply chain visibility and identify alternative, more sustainable ingredients that meet quality and taste requirements.

Transportation and logistics play a crucial role in achieving sustainability and efficiency. Through Flowers’ direct-store-delivery network, the company ships fresh goods from bakeries to depots to be picked up for delivery to retail and foodservice customers. The company consolidated its delivery service from five to four days at select warehouses and has plans to expand this initiative.

“It saves fuel, extends the life of equipment and improves our overall carbon impact,” Marsh said. “For each warehouse converted, we’ve reduced miles driven by an estimated 27,500 miles per year.”

Where there’s space for efficiency, there’s space for sustainability. By prioritizing waste elimination and optimizing resource use, commercial bakeries are primed to boost their impact … in more ways than one.

This has been adapted from the August | Q3 2025 issue of Commercial Baking. Read the full digital edition here.

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