The Challenge: Impact Lives in the Product, not the Machine
Every day, two billion people consume foods produced on Bühler equipment. Bühler is the company behind many of the solutions that turn raw grains into flour, cocoa into chocolate, and various ingredients into baked goods. Its technology is everywhere in the food system.
When Bühler asked itself how it could contribute to a more sustainable future, part of the answer was that the environmental impact of its business was not primarily in the machines themselves.
“We didn’t want to make it only about our own machinery and our own processing solutions, but rather understanding the full eventual impact of the product,” Stefan says, highlighting the importance of measuring the full life cycle. “Because in the end, it’s all about products. People buy products, people see products, and they value or don’t value products.”
That insight pointed the way. Bühler needed to understand more than just the energy consumed by a specific piece of equipment, but also the raw materials, transport, processing steps, and downstream effects that together determine a product’s full environmental footprint, so that the key levers to improve the products total footprint could be targeted.
At the same time, Bühler’s customers faced a practical problem. Understanding the environmental footprint of a food product is a complex undertaking. It requires LCA expertise, process data, and the ability to model tradeoffs between raw material choices, recipe formulations, and manufacturing configurations. Many companies do not have that capability in-house at the required depth or scale, and those that do often find themselves spending more time producing numbers than acting on them.
The Solution: LCA as a Service and a Sales Tool
Bühler’s response was to build the capability itself and then make it available to customers in a form they could use.
The foundation was a comprehensive set of internal life cycle assessments across Bühler’s major value chains (flour milling, chocolate production, and baked goods). Powered by ecoinvent agricultural data, these LCAs gave Bühler a rigorous, quantified understanding of where environmental impact occurs across food processing, and where its technology could make the most difference.
“We assessed all of the value chains in which we operate to really understand what the contribution of our processing technology is, so that we could understand what the potential levers are that we can actually pull in development, in implementation, and monitoring to really drive down the environmental impact of the products in the end,” Stefan explains.
From that foundation, Bühler developed two distinct offerings. The first is a consulting service, led by Stefan’s team, that works directly with customers on environmental quantification, LCA, and reduction strategy. The second is a dynamic LCA software tool that puts that capability in the hands of customers’ own teams without requiring them to rebuild the underlying complexity from scratch. These tools and services rely extensively on ecoinvent data.
The software tool works by embedding Bühler’s process expertise and LCA models in the background, then allowing customers to adjust the variables that matter to them: recipe formulations, raw material choices, manufacturing configurations, distribution scenarios. The output is a real-time product carbon footprint that reflects their specific operational setup.
According to Prockl, “a client’s salesperson is able to say, ‘Dear customer, we have recipe A, B, C, and D. And I can tell you the carbon footprint right away. If you want a reduction of that carbon footprint, we have options A, B, and C.'”
This shift from consulting-led execution to customer-owned software was deliberate. Consulting projects are a good starting point, but the value of LCA data is only fully realized when customers internalize the knowledge and bring it into their own sales, procurement, and manufacturing decisions.
Alongside the software tool, Bühler developed a customer-first sales approach that integrates sustainability questions into the discovery process. A salesperson considering which industrial oven to recommend does not just ask about capacity and throughput. With the new approach, they also ask about the customer’s decarbonization strategy, available budget, and equipment age. These answers identify the combination of technology and process change that offers the most value, at both the financial and the environmental level.
Bühler also operates research and training centers where customers can physically test alternative raw materials and process configurations on Bühler equipment before committing to changes at scale. This matters because the theory of a more sustainable recipe and the reality of a sellable product are not always the same.
The Outcome: Deeper Partnerships and Longer Conversations
This approach has added a new dimension to Bühler’s customer relationship works. Conversations that once focused on the next equipment purchase now extend to how the customer’s operations will perform in a decade or more.
“Customer relationships move more towards a partnership, towards a combined outcome,” Stefan says. “We start talking about not just the next zero to five years, but we start talking about what’s happening in your operations in the next ten to twenty years.”
That longer horizon opens a different kind of conversation – one that Bühler is uniquely positioned for. Because their products enable the processing of raw materials across dozens of food value chains, it understands the long-term supply dynamics of those materials. That knowledge becomes a form of proactive advising.
“We understand the pressure that customers will be under in ten to twenty years, for example from . So, we will not only have the conversation of how we can improve the process that they already have, but what can we actually change about the whole process setup,” Stefan explains.
The cocoa category illustrates this convergence clearly. Cocoa carries a significant carbon footprint, and it is also one of the most volatile commodity markets in the food system, as price spikes in recent years have emphasized.
