Lending a hand to the environment with innovative ‘SuperFreezer’

Chr. Hansen’s partnership with a major global dairy customer in Brazil has resulted in a streamlined and sustainable supply chain, significantly reducing transportation costs and environmental impact.

“We were invited by our customer to come up with feasible ideas for reducing costs in the supply chain for frozen cultures. The result is a so-called SuperFreezer, which is a special transportation container working as a cold chamber with a constant temperature of minus 60 Cº,” explains Sten Estrup, Regional Vice President, Chr. Hansen, South America.

The SuperFreezer ensures the final product quality during the processes of sea transport, storage and handling of frozen cultures, reducing the operational complexity and optimizing the costs – and last but not least it benefits the environment.

Preliminary calculations show that just one shipment in a SuperFreezer container consisting of nine tons of frozen cultures reduces CO2 emissions by as much as 202 tons compared to air freight, equal to the emissions of 20 households per year.

A sustainable win-win

A major element in the effective reduction of our carbon footprint is replacing energy-consuming air freight with cost-effective and environmentally friendly sea shipment.

“We challenged ourselves to optimize the supply chain and identified a range of ideas for improvement, such as transport, packaging size, ordering and delivery frequency. Evaluation and prioritization of the ideas took place in an open process with our customer.

The fact that we actually met our customer’s demand for cost efficiency while achieving significant environmental benefits makes this project a sustainable win-win,” says Sten Estrup.

Large potential for further reduction

It takes a creative mind to solve the challenge of keeping the temperature down to -60º C in a +30º C environment. A number of specialists from Chr. Hansen Brazil as well as from headquarters in Denmark worked closely together over several months to come up with the innovative concept, which is ready to be rolled out in other countries.

Applying the SuperFreezer solution as alternative means of transportation for frozen cultures to just 3-4 selected countries could generate a significant reduction of more than 6,000 tons of CO2 per year, equal to the annual emissions of close to 600 households. Applying the technique more widely will have an even larger potential for reducing Chr. Hansen’s carbon footprint.

A sign of commitment

”This is an excellent example of how Chr. Hansen integrates Corporate Social Responsibility in our business activities, and it underlines our commitment to CSR in the entire company,” comments Henriette Oellgaard, CSR Manager.

In 2010 Chr. Hansen established a CSR Board anchored at the top management level of Chr. Hansen, chaired by the CEO. This is a visible statement to the company’s stakeholders that we take sustainability very seriously and intend to broaden our scope in this area.

Read more on www.chr-hansen.com/CSR