Seven Standout Examples of Resilience Building
Becoming more resilient to an increasingly adverse environment is crucial to companies. Whether they’re facing climate change challenges – may that be in supply chain trouble, ingredient availability or utilities availability on site -, economic strife – inflation, taxes -, or consumer changing preferences, all bakers must have plans in place.
Major European companies – bakers and ingredient producers alike – have been investing heavily in recent years in resilient systems, technology and even topology. All with one purpose in mind: to overcome the next economic struggles, but also to be better prepared to grow. In the examples we gathered, you’ll see a mix of innovation and best practice, all based on honest assessment of one’s challenges. Here are the companies that inspire better business across the board.
1) Lantmännen Unibake (Poland): cold-chain throughput + digital traceability
To de-risk service levels for frozen bake-off across CEE and beyond, Lantmännen Unibake built a new logistics center in Nowa Sól capable of dispatching ~100 pallets/hour and hard-wired it to production for end-to-end traceability. The high-throughput, tech-led hub reduces dwell times, smooths peaks and gives the group redundancy across warehouses – classic structural resilience for frozen bakery.
Why it matters: By decoupling storage/picking from plant bottlenecks and standardising digital handshakes between baking and logistics, Unibake insulates customer OTIF (on-time, in-full) from line hiccups and transport volatility.
2) Europastry (Pan-EU): advanced planning to absorb volatility
When Europastry set out to “transform how it plans, schedules and manages its complex frozen supply chain,” it deployed DELMIA Ortems to orchestrate constrained planning across plants and SKUs. DELMIA is a software that provides high-tech manufacturers with powerful virtual simulation and modeling capabilities to optimize their production processes. This is the dull but decisive backbone of operational resilience: faster re-planning when demand shifts, better asset loading, and fewer cascade effects when a line or route fails.
Why it matters: Digital advanced planning & scheduling closes the gap between sales volatility and factory reality; the ability to re-optimise quickly is a proven hedge against shocks.
3) Fazer Bakeries (Finland): energy-security playbook from crisis to normal
Fazer’s response to the 2022–23 energy shock is a model sequence: install oil-fired back-up equipment on key lines to secure heat (short-term continuity), then pivot to fossil-free district heating at all large Finnish bakeries (structural risk reduction). On top, the group now moves a growing share of finished goods using biogas produced from its own inedible bakery waste, closing the loop on fuel and shrinking exposure to fossil price spikes.
Why it matters: Dual-fuel capability plus renewable heat and renewable natural gas logistics diversify energy inputs, stabilise costs, and keep ovens on during grid or gas disruptions.
4) Greggs (UK): network redundancy via new frozen campus
Greggs is mid-way through a multi-node supply-chain upgrade: a new Derby frozen manufacturing and logistics site with automated cold store and shop-level picking (coming online 2026) and a new national distribution centre at Kettering. The program adds capacity for thousands of shops and creates parallel routes-to-market, so single-site failures don’t cascade.
Why it matters: Resilience here is about topology: more hubs, automation in cold chain, and segmented flows for frozen/chilled/ambient to keep service steady through demand spikes or outages. The company’s updates emphasise that the Derby site mirrors the northern campus, intentionally building redundancy.
5) Harry-Brot (Germany): capacity consolidation to stabilize market supply
Germany’s Harry-Brot secured approval in April 2025 to acquire REWE’s Glockenbrot industrial bakery at Bergkirchen, consolidating capacity in a region that’s seen cost and energy shocks. Combined with ongoing capital expenditure at existing plants, the move gives Harry flexibility to rebalance volumes, maintain availability and rationalize logistics.
Why it matters: M&A isn’t just scale, it’s a resilience lever when it removes fragile nodes, spreads fixed costs across more lines, and creates spare capacity for contingencies.
6) Finsbury Food Group (UK/Ireland): site upgrades + backbone IT for continuity
Finsbury is executing a multi-million investment at its Kara (Manchester) foodservice bakery to lift efficiency, modernize kit and build headroom for channel swings. Under the hood, the group’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and HR/payroll overhauls standardized processes and roles across sites – less glamorous than ovens, but critical for recoverability, staff redeployment and cross-site load-sharing.
Why it matters: Process and systems harmonization reduce single-point dependencies on people or legacy tools; they also speed crisis roll-ups and re-planning.
7) Puratos (EU-wide upstream): hardening wheat and cocoa supply at source
Ingredient resilience is the bakery sector’s Achilles’ heel. Puratos is tackling it on two fronts: sourcing programmes like Cacao-Trace to increase direct-trade transparency and stability in cocoa, and Europe’s Sustainable Wheat Initiative (industry-led; Puratos a signatory) aiming to cut CO₂e in wheat/flour by 30% by 2030 while improving traceability and agronomic robustness. Upstream diversification and closer farmer programmes build a sturdier raw-material base for industrial bakers.
Why it matters: A more transparent, lower-volatility ingredient chain shortens shock recovery times for bread and viennoiserie manufacturers. Thus, resilience starts before the mill.