Sustainability
At Tip Top Bakeries, we strive to do the right thing for our people, our products, our planet, and our business. Through our businesses in Australia and New Zealand we believe in doing good every day. This means taking action today for a more sustainable tomorrow.
That’s why we’ve set ourselves meaningful commitments across our Sustainability Pillars - People, Products, and Planet – which provides us the framework to do good every day.
Our People Pillar covers our focus on safety, inclusion & diversity, protecting human rights and eliminating modern slavery, and our support for the community. Our Planet Pillar covers the work we do to tackle climate change through energy and emissions reductions, including our use of renewable energy. Our Products Pillar includes our focus on food safety & quality, increasing the health and nutritional profile of our products, reducing or eliminating problematic packaging, and reducing food waste.
Our People
Our Commitments
Inclusion & Diversity
We are committed to providing a safe and inclusive workplace, where our people can be themselves, and feel their best every day.
Our vision for Tip Top Bakeries is to be a place where everyone belongs, everyone is valued, and everyone has equal opportunity. We strive to be a place where people can achieve their work and life goals, and be valued for who they are not what they do. To achieve this vision, we’ve communicated our intent, trained our leaders and started conversations all across our business about inclusion and belonging. We’ve created inclusive policies and processes and developed tools that equip our people to make a difference.
Health & Wellbeing
We maintain a regular focus on health and wellbeing, including mental health, to enable our Tip Top Bakeries employees to be at their best every day.
We have taken action to reduce manual handling risks, including providing our people with access to onsite physio support, with a preventative and responsive approach to treatment. We also offer access to health assessments, strengthening programs, and training to ensure our team is using the best manual handling techniques.
Inclusion & Diversity
We are committed to providing a safe and inclusive workplace, where our people can be themselves, and feel their best every day.
Our vision for Tip Top Bakeries is an organisation where everyone belongs, everyone is valued, and everyone has equal opportunity. To achieve this vision, we have created inclusive policies and processes, and have created training programs and resources to equip our people with the tools they need to make a difference.
Supporting our Community ‘Caring Everyday’
We are committed to tackling the issue of food insecurity in Australia and New Zealand. We donate 2 million loaves of bread every year through our charity partnerships with Foodbank in Australia. Click here to read the Foodbank Hunger Report 2024. We also deliver thousands of Tip Top Supersoft High Fibre and Tip Top Oatilicious toast loaves every week to schools across New Zealand through our partnership with KidsCan in New Zealand.
Our Products
Our Commitments
Introducing New Bread Bags made with 30% Recycled Plastic
We're taking further steps to reduce our environmental impact by introducing new bread bags made with 30% recycled plastic using the mass balance approach. These new bread bags will be used for our Tip Top The One, Tip Top 9 Grain and Tip Top The One Gluten Free loaves, and our Abbott’s Bakery sliced bread loaves. This helps to reuse and recycle valuable plastic materials, reducing the need for new plastic production.
Previously, our Ploughmans Bakery brand in New Zealand became the first brand to introduce recycled plastic into its bread bags in May 2022, reducing its use of virgin plastic by 30%. Learn more about our Sustainability efforts in New Zealand by watching the video below.
We work hard to ensure our products are safe, consistently high quality, and support good health and nutrition. We are constantly seeking to improve and enhance our food safety and quality through training, education, and quality assurance processes.
Tip Top is an active participant in the Government’s Health Star Rating system. This is a voluntary labelling system to educate consumers on the healthiness of foods. Currently over 87% of our Tip Top Bakeries bread products have a Health Star rating of 3.5 stars or more, and we are continually improving the nutritional profile of our products.
Tip Top Recycled and Recyclable Bread Bag Tags
We are constantly working towards a more sustainable future. Every day we are looking at ways to reduce our impact on the environment, including our baking processes, our packaging, and how our products are distributed. We want to keep Australia and New Zealand beautiful for generations to come. We were the first company in Australia and New Zealand to introduce 100% recycled and recyclable bread tags. The roll out of these cardboard tags means we will be preventing approx. 300 million plastic tags from ending up in our local waste streams.
You can easily recycle your cardboard tags in kerbside recycling bins by tucking the tag securely inside other paper or cardboard products, such as an envelope or paper bag, giving them the best chance of being recycled into a new product rather than being sent to landfill.
Our Planet
Our Commitments
In our journey towards a renewable energy future, Tip Top has installed solar arrays in 6 of our operating sites (Townsville, Bendigo, Truganina Depot, Dry Creek, Carrara and Chullora) and we plan to increase solar energy usage in more sites over the coming years. Once complete, this program will contribute to removing 8,000 tonnes of Co2 emissions from the atmosphere per year.
These solar installations have both environmental and commercial benefits for Tip Top. The savings from these solar energy projects will be invested into new sustainability initiatives towards our long-term ambition of using 100% renewable electricity across our sites.
Our Business
We run our business ethically and responsibly, and sustainability is considered by our leaders in every part of our business. This means that our sustainability agenda is shaped by the people who are closest to the business opportunities and risks, with direct ownership and accountability to bring these ideas into effect.
As a division of George Weston Foods (GWF), our Tip Top Bakeries leaders are in constant dialogue with our colleagues in the GWF Group, ensuring we are aligned on our overall Sustainability Framework and can share common areas of positive impact across our businesses. The GWF Sustainability Report highlights the many achievements that our businesses have achieved, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead within our Sustainability Roadmap.