We believe in plant-based
At Espresso House we are aware that our greatest environmental impact trickles down to the products that we serve. Therefore, this is an area where we continuously need to innovate and renew and where our focus has been towards plant-based options. According to the UN Climate Change report ‘a shift toward plant-based diets is one of the most significant ways to reduce greenhouse gases from the agriculture sector’. We believe in this too, and in fact, already in 2017 we started expanding our plant-based and vegetarian options on food and drinks, a work that has been ongoing ever since. We have set a goal that strives for 50% plant-based food and drinks in our assortments, and in the end of 2020 we had reached an average of 46% for all countries.
During 2020 many new plant-based products were trialed and developed. Our own Bakery delivered a range of five vegan products including three Cookies and a Caramel Pecan brownie that became a best-seller amongst these products. During Christmas campaign, we also launched a vegan saffron cookie. We saw new vegan Frapinos, bowls and new vegan products in our grab ‘n’ go box on the counter. In Germany we also launched a new delicious vegan avocado bread roll, and in Denmark a new vegan focaccia. Finland offers a vegan raw cake from a local Finnish bakery.
The demand for plant-based amongst our guests have been increasing steadily throughout the past years and this can for example be observed in the use of plant-based milk for hot and cold drinks across all countries. In 2020, approximately 12% of all hot drinks were sold with plant-based milk, compared to 8,2% in 2019. The plant-based alternatives to cow’s milk includes oat, soy, pea and coconut milk with some variations between the countries. Oat is our most popular plant-based option.
Our own bakery
At Espresso House we are proud to serve baked bread and pastry from our very own Espresso House Bakery. Located in Arlöv outside Malmö in Sweden, the bakery is run by a devoted and professional team of baking masters who are working everyday to develop and bake various delicious products of highest quality for our coffee shops. With its 7200 square meters and 45 employees, the bakery produced 1980 tons of products in 2020 including 345 000 delicious vegan cookies and 239 000 vegan brownies which was the first ever plant-based produce of the Bakery.
In the continuous work towards maintaining and improving our food quality and safety, the bakery was in November 2020 again certified for quality and food-safety, with the grade AA according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) Food Safety Standard. We have also continued our work in ensuring responsible sourcing of raw ingredients such as cocoa. The bakery became in March 2020 members of UTZ (www.utz.org) and we are now using good insight portal to register all of our purchases of cocoa for traceability. 73% of all cocoa powder purchased in 2020 was UTZ certified.