Letter to Stakeholders

Together, for a new corporate culture

Our commitment to sustainability has deep roots integral to our status as a cooperative business, but identity alone cannot guarantee a responsible approach to people and the environment. This process has to be constantly nurtured to increase the integration of sustainability into our strategic decisions and to ensure our success in our challenging aim of changing our corporate culture by gradually shifting it, day by day, towards a sustainable horizon. Our journey to sustainability is evolving all the time and has now created “camstobenefit”, the key factor in this account of a year with many major milestones. 

2023 was the year of transition to Benefit Cooperative Corporation status, which reinforced our commitment to sustainability policies with the aim of generating a positive impact on society and the environment, ensuring responsible, transparent operation in relation to our stakeholders. Our cooperative returned a profit with earnings of €568 million, or €710 million in the group’s consolidated financial statements, after three years of problematical economic and social scenarios. 

With regard to environmental sustainability, we launched an LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) study and measured the impact of our catering operations to enable us to start to plan our path to decarbonisation, which will lead us to carbon neutrality. The aim for 2024-25 is to continue this analysis, extending it to embrace the operations of the facility division, to provide a full picture and allow us to draw up a plan for mitigating our environmental impacts.

With regard to the safeguarding and well-being of people, we have worked on our employee training plan, workplace quality, the promotion of diversity and inclusiveness. Therefore, during 2023 – as well as consolidating our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion management in accordance with the ISO 30415 standard – we began the procedure for Gender Equality Certification (Italian Presidential Decree 125), which we achieved early in 2024. 

We view this year as marking an important step in this process: we are aware that to make real progress in this direction it is fundamental to listen more and more carefully to what all of you, our stakeholders, have to tell us. 

For the 2023 Report we established a more structured, constructive dialogue with all of you, our partners, customers, vendors and employees and everyone who interacts directly with us. This has enabled us to draw up our first double materiality matrix, which defines the ESG topics of greatest significance in terms of impacts generated and risks for our organisation, information of fundamental importance for drawing up a future strategy that integrates sustainability more and more closely in our business. 

The effectiveness of a strategy focused on environmental and social sustainability objectives alongside economic targets underlies the new strategic plan which will be presented in 2025, the year when Camst will celebrate its 80th birthday. 

We are proud of the results achieved and aware of how far we still have to go together, towards the future we want. 

Francesco Malaguti

Chairman, Camst group