The Innovator: Piet Tæstensen

January 18, 2024

Piet Tæstensen, CEO of Aasted, stresses the different forms sustainability has taken at Aasted: from energy efficiency to machinery longevity, their quest to be more sustainable is ongoing

Please introduce yourself and your role within the company?

My name is Piet Tæstensen and I’m the CEO of Aasted. I’ve been with the company since 2005, so I have quite a lot of experience of working in this industry and at this business.

What is the history of Aasted? What have been significant milestones for the company?

Aasted is a family-owned company and has been so for many, many decades. It was first established in 1917, so we’ve already celebrated our 100-year anniversary. Since the last 20 years, we’ve tried to penetrate deeper into processes within the industry including chocolate moulding, confectionery, and bakery production.

As a sustainability-oriented business, what targets have you set?

Sustainability has been a high priority topic for us for many years. We created our first energy efficient machines back in the 2010s. In the last three to four years, however, our approach has evolved. We’re trying to integrate our sustainability agenda into how we do business.

For example, we’ve implemented what we call the triple Ps: instead of focusing mainly on profit, we now have ‘people, planet and profit’ which we take into consideration every time we decide. Last year, we added to our publicly available business objective that a major reason why we’re here is to have a positive impact on society and the environment. So, sustainability is in the core of our purpose and of what we do.

With regards to our sustainability targets, we have started reducing our scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions and our energy consumption. We have signed up for Science Based Targets with a Net Zero target for scope 1 and 2, and I believe we will achieve this ahead of time. It’s a very simple and almost cliché outlook on sustainability, but if everybody cleaned up after themselves, there wouldn’t be so many issues.

Looking at scope 3 emissions is where we have more than 98% of our footprint, and this is challenging to address. You can’t address this alone – you need to partner with, on one end your suppliers and on the other end, your customers.

We’d like to reduce our footprint by 50% in 2030 in scope 3 emissions which is a very ambitious target. Right now, we are building our setup for calculating the yearly emissions and looking at the levers for reducing them.

Besides the energy and climate, it is important to be aware that sustainability is much broader. So, we also work on the waste, the use of chemicals, on health and safety, on diversity and inclusion, on business ethics and many other important topics – both in our own company…

This feature is from our upcoming January issue. Read our magazine here.