Dear readers,

“Transform to Flourish” – this guiding principle expresses our belief that a sustainable transformation can create a promising future, as well as a healthy, vibrant, and just world. We are convinced that regenerative value creation will allow nature and society to prosper – and we want to play our part in this process.

Six of the nine boundaries of our planet have now been exceeded. In order to preserve our habitat and thus the basis of our prosperity, we must therefore revise our relationship with nature. In doing so, we need to align ourselves with its abilities and limitations and return to a way of living and doing business that is viable and sustainable for our global ecosystems and that enables them to regenerate.

As a family business with 115 years of tradition, our confidence in the future, our entrepreneurial courage, and our strong focus on the people who work directly or indirectly for us have helped us overcome numerous adversities. Despite all the challenges of our economic, ecological, and social environment, the fourth and subsequent generations of owners will continue to shape the transformation process on the basis of our corporate values. Apart from the obvious need for transformation, we also see opportunities for us to join hands with our business partners and shape a future worth living for us all.

We are currently developing our strategy for the next ten years. A core element of this strategy is a comprehensive transformation. In our Sustainability Statement published in late 2019, we at the Melitta Group set ourselves the goal of ensuring that our products have no detrimental impact on the environment or social systems. We want to help pave the way from a consumer society to a meaningful society, while working towards an intact environment in harmony with people’s well-being. We want a world in which an ecologically meaningful way of living and working becomes a self-evident and collective reality.

We have therefore refined our entrepreneurial alignment: in future, it will be shaped even more by the dimensions “Regenerative Value Creation”, “Work Culture”, and “Social Business”. Over the coming years, we will align our corporate identity, our structures and processes, as well as our products and supply chains, more consistently with these three strategic dimensions. Among other things, they form the basis for our commitment to shaping the future of our most important commodities and product ranges – coffee, plastics, pulp, and electrical appliances.

Of course, we are still a long way from where we want to be. And like many others, we regard our transformation into a sustainable company as a journey. Along the way, we are constantly learning – while both the goals and the best way to achieve them are still only partially clear. However, one thing is certain: we want to achieve a visible and tangible relevance for society and for the preservation of our habitat and thus lay the foundation for the Melitta Group’s successful business operations in the coming decades. We are convinced that we can achieve this with innovation, cooperation, and courage.

In the past fiscal year, we made considerable progress in this regard: we defined our targets and KPIs more precisely, raised awareness of sustainability-related issues among our target groups, and implemented numerous measures. At the same time, we expanded our partnerships, adapted our sustainability structures, and improved our processes for complying with sustainability standards. Most importantly, we worked on our future concepts and enhanced our coffee, pulp, plastics, and electrical products to ensure they become or remain pioneers of sustainable development within their sectors. This report – which represents the non-financial section of our annual report – provides information on this progress.

We look forward to engaging with you and working together on solutions for a sustainable economy!

With best regards