Grupo Bimbo accelerates its sustainability journey with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Bringing humanity and sustainability to global business

At global baked goods company Grupo Bimbo—producer of familiar products by Sara Lee, Entenmann’s, Oroweat, Marinela, and its namesake Bimbo brand—sustainability is everyone’s job. “We have associates who focus on sustainability, but every associate has a part to play, from new product design and supply sourcing to production and distribution,” says Alejandra Vazquez, Global Sustainability Vice President at Grupo Bimbo. 

For Grupo Bimbo, sustainability isn’t a newfound ambition—it’s been part of the company’s core mission since its founding more than 75 years ago. “We have always aimed to be a sustainable, highly productive, and deeply humane company,” says Vazquez. “Our purpose is to nourish a better world, and we put people and our planet at the center of everything we do.”

Grupo Bimbo sustainability goals for 2025, 2030, and 2050 call for the company to have healthier and simpler recipes, a competitive plant-based portfolio, and strong support for its business partners. The company also aims to create safe, diverse, and inclusive workplaces and fight the degradation of nature by becoming a net zero carbon emissions company, switching to regenerative agriculture, and working toward achieving zero waste.

Grupo Bimbo is headquartered in Mexico, with more than 200 bakeries and other plants in 33 countries, along with a worldwide distribution network serving more than 54,000 routes. Grupo Bimbo has a massive operating footprint, which makes it challenging to track and analyze its Scope 1 and 2 operating emissions and even more challenging to manage Scope 3 emissions across the full value chain.

“It’s a very complex task to gather and measure all the inputs and monitor all the different variables,” explains Irene Espinola, Net Zero Carbon Global Director at Grupo Bimbo. “We need to connect many data sources, make sure we’re measuring the right things, and create appropriate key performance indicators. This requires close collaboration with all our suppliers, including our technology vendors.”

Traditionally, Grupo Bimbo has tracked its environmental performance with several internal systems, including the Bimbo Environmental Sustainability Tool (BEST). These systems have helped Grupo Bimbo make significant progress toward sustainability goals, but they can be labor-intensive to use, requiring a lot of manual data collection and input that is subject to human error. To gain a single, holistic view into all of its sustainability efforts and to minimize manual management, Grupo Bimbo began looking for an integrated solution. 

Taking the sustainability journey to the cloud

Grupo Bimbo turned to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, a comprehensive solution for automated sustainability management built on trusted Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Azure, Dataverse, Power BI, and Microsoft Power Platform. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability helps Grupo Bimbo streamline data collection, integration, analysis, and reporting, and provides the single view of its progress that the company was seeking. 

“Microsoft has done a lot of work around sustainability for its own business, and it was important for us to work with a technology supplier that shares our values,” says Juan Pajón, Business Technology Global Senior Vice President at Grupo Bimbo. “We also felt confident that our data would be well protected in the highly secure Microsoft ecosystem in line with our cybersecurity strategy.”

Grupo Bimbo is using Microsoft Sustainability Manager, a Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution, to gather data from internal systems, external sources, and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors across its operations and supply chain into a common data model for easy monitoring. As part of its implementation strategy, Grupo Bimbo took the time to carefully analyze existing processes and systems to ensure that all functionalities could move to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability in a way that would be as seamless as possible for associates who are used to BEST. The company made plans for a pilot deployment to ensure that the new tool would perform as expected and needed.

Grupo Bimbo chose Latin America for the pilot with Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and the results were in line with what the company was seeking. Grupo Bimbo used this test deployment to build out a roadmap for how to deploy Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to its other locations, it also started examining how to automate data input and expand the scope of the deployment to include the tricky Scope 3 (supply chain) emissions and subsequently implement it in the rest of the company’s sustainability initiatives. 

“By collecting and assessing our Scope 3 emissions data, we can help our suppliers make progress toward their own sustainability goals,” says Vazquez. “We need to work together to create the regenerative supply chain we’re aiming for—this isn’t something we can do alone.”

Turning sustainability data into decisions

Grupo Bimbo appreciates how easy it has been to use Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability in its work so far. “The user experience is one of the best parts of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability,” says Guadalupe Bravo, Business Architecture Director at Grupo Bimbo. “Even team members without extensive technology experience understand it very quickly.”

In the pilot deployment, the solution helped Grupo Bimbo gain insights into its environmental performance that could help shape business decisions. As the deployment expands, Grupo Bimbo will connect more data sources directly into Sustainability Manager to automate the data collection that has been manual in the past. Much of the company’s data is already in Azure, which is helping streamline the process. With connectivity to its data sources established and automated, Grupo Bimbo can spend less time collecting and managing data and more time using that data to understand the company’s environmental footprint and make choices that help the company meet or beat its sustainability goals. 

“Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability has been great for us because we can take advantage of the data and processes we already have in place without changing everything,” says Vazquez. “And for the first time we have a single location for all of our sustainability data—things like water and waste, but also data about social sustainability programs and nutritional profiles.”

“The impact is going to be huge,” adds Espinola. “Not just for Grupo Bimbo, but also for our suppliers, investors, and customers, who are increasingly looking to do business with companies that have robust sustainability initiatives in place.”

Reflecting on the success of the work thus far, Pajón suggests some important steps for any company planning a project like this. “It’s vital to have a sustainability strategy and vision in place first, and to understand your existing processes thoroughly,” he says. “The trick is to not let the tools dictate your strategy—the tools should enable the strategy you’ve already established. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability could be a great solution for achieving our sustainability goals.”

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