Grupo Bimbo bets on the net-zero bakery

Grupo Bimbo’s net-zero bakery strategy explained:

• Bimbo’s Portugal trial showed that a 1998 tunnel oven could be retrofitted to run one baking zone on 100% hydrogen without compromising bread quality.
• Hydrogen faces competition from electrification and other low-carbon technologies, with cost, infrastructure and energy availability likely to determine which solutions work where.
• Bimbo is tackling emissions beyond the bakery through regenerative agriculture, renewable electricity and cleaner transport as it works towards net zero by 2050.

A 28-year-old bread oven in Portugal became an unlikely testing ground for one of industrial baking’s biggest challenges: how to get fossil fuels out of the bakery without tearing apart the infrastructure already in place.

During the two-week trial in October 2025, engineers replaced 12 natural gas burners in one zone of the commercial tunnel oven with burners capable of running on 100% hydrogen, completing the retrofit in just two days. The results, revealed by Grupo Bimbo and AMF Bakery Systems in June, showed the converted zone had repeatedly reached the required temperatures while baking a range of bread products without affecting product quality.

Engineers also put the technology through its paces under live manufacturing conditions, testing leak detection, purging, ventilation and emergency shutdown systems.

The findings raise an intriguing possibility for an industry still heavily dependent on natural gas. Industrial ovens are expensive assets designed to operate for decades and sit within production systems encompassing proofing, loading, unloading, cooling and downstream handling. If existing equipment can be converted to a lower-carbon energy source, manufacturers potentially have another route to decarbonisation without rebuilding large sections of otherwise productive lines.

“Bread baking with Direct Hydrogen-Fired (DHF) burners demonstrates performance comparable to conventional baking methods with respect to product quality, safety, and sensory characteristics,” said AMF. “The results confirm the feasibility of hydrogen technology as a sustainable and viable alternative for industrial tin and hearth bread production with zero carbon emissions.”

That final claim comes with a sizeable qualification. Hydrogen’s environmental credentials depend on how it’s produced, while green hydrogen remains constrained by cost, availability and infrastructure – Bimbo’s trial itself relied on a temporary external hydrogen supply. Nor is hydrogen the only technology competing to replace natural gas. The experiment is better viewed as one part of Bimbo’s broader attempt to answer the question facing every major baker with a net-zero pledge: how do you decarbonise an industrial bakery without compromising the economics, output or quality of the bread?

Bread’s next energy battle

Grupo Bimbo committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions across its value chain by 2050 in November 2021, becoming the first Mexican food company to commit to the Science Based Targets initiative’s framework for net-zero emissions. Its roadmap included a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 1 emissions and a 28% reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030 against a 2019 baseline, followed by net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2040.

Electricity has been one of the first areas tackled. Bimbo says renewable sources now account for electricity equivalent to 100% of its consumption against its 2020 baseline. That still leaves the considerable amount of thermal energy required to turn dough into billions of loaves, buns, tortillas and other baked goods.

The Portuguese experiment was designed specifically to tackle that problem. Baking Zone 2 was converted to 12 hydrogen-fired units, each rated at 16kW and providing a combined maximum capacity of 192kW. Over the following two weeks, a range of breads was produced using hydrogen in the converted zone.

Changing the heat source isn’t simply a question of whether an oven gets hot enough. Variations in heat transfer can alter crust formation, crumb structure, moisture retention, colour and finished product weight. Hydrogen therefore has to replicate the tightly controlled baking conditions of natural gas at high volume. If it can’t, any carbon advantage becomes largely irrelevant to a commercial baker.

AMF also says hydrogen combustion allowed the oven to operate at a lower overall temperature and slightly reduced natural gas consumption in the remaining zones, although it hasn’t published figures showing the size of that reduction. The trial wasn’t without problems either. AMF acknowledged ignition difficulties and says further engineering work is required before permanent implementation.

More fundamentally, proving hydrogen can bake bread doesn’t establish that green hydrogen will be the cheapest or most efficient way to decarbonise an industrial oven.

UK biscuit manufacturer Burton’s Foods has already tested the case for electrification. A government-backed feasibility study found that commercially available electric ovens could replicate the quality achieved by gas-fired equipment but weren’t yet cost competitive because efficiency savings failed to offset higher electricity prices. The work subsequently progressed to Project NEO, a £3.32m government-backed programme to develop and trial a high-efficiency electric oven on an industrial site, testing its impact on product cost, quality and production rates.

Warburtons is taking a broader approach. All the electricity it buys comes from certified renewable sources, while solar panels at its Bristol and Enfield bakeries and wind turbines at Bristol generated more than 800,000kWh in 2024. It’s also recovering waste heat, improving oven insulation and using burners that shut down during production gaps. Optimised prover controls at its Tuscany Park bakery have cut gas used for heating by 40%, while a £2m combined heat and power plant became operational at Bellshill in January 2024, joining existing systems at Wednesbury, Bristol and Bolton. Warburtons says its operational CO2 emissions have fallen 20% over the past decade.

There may be no single winner in the race to replace natural gas. Electrification could make more sense in markets with plentiful renewable electricity and sufficient grid capacity, while hydrogen, biomethane or hybrid systems could have advantages elsewhere.

Bimbo’s 1998 oven wasn’t designed with hydrogen or net zero in mind, yet one of its baking zones was converted and continued producing bread to specification. If that approach proves commercially scalable, bakers may be able to decarbonise some of their most capital-intensive assets without consigning them to the scrapyard.

Half a million hectares changes the equation

Decarbonising the oven alone, though, won’t decarbonise the loaf.

Bimbo’s verified 2019 baseline put emissions across its value chain at approximately 9.5 million tonnes of CO2e. Its 28% Scope 3 reduction target pushes the challenge beyond its own factories and into agriculture, ingredients, packaging, transport and suppliers.

By the end of 2025, Bimbo reported more than 500,000 hectares under regenerative agricultural practices for wheat, corn and potatoes across Canada, the US, Mexico, Brazil, Paraguay, the UK and France. Its eventual goal is for 100% of its key ingredients to come from land cultivated using regenerative practices by 2050.

“Agriculture is the starting point of everything we do,” said David Hernandez, Bimbo’s global procurement VP. “Regenerative agriculture enables us to strengthen the resilience of our supply chain, collaborate closely with farmers and ensure the availability of key ingredients for the future. At the same time, we contribute to improving soil health and creating shared value for the farming communities we work with.”

There’s a commercial imperative behind the programme, too. Extreme weather, water stress, soil degradation and commodity volatility threaten the availability and price of the raw materials on which industrial bakery depends. Regenerative agriculture is therefore being positioned not only as a way to reduce environmental impact, but to protect ingredient supply.

Bimbo’s headline acreage nevertheless needs context. Regenerative agriculture has no single universally applied definition, practices vary between crops and countries, and putting land under regenerative management doesn’t automatically translate into a corresponding amount of verified carbon removal. How much of Bimbo’s total ingredient requirement those hectares supply, how improvements are measured and whether farmers can make the transition economically viable will become increasingly important measures of progress.

The Mexico City-headquartered company is also targeting emissions after products leave the factory. Bimbo now operates more than 4,000 electric vehicles globally, while its wider environmental programme covers alternative fuels, lower-carbon logistics, packaging, food waste, water and energy efficiency.

When the company published its 2025 Integrated Annual Report in May, Alejandra Vázquez, global leader of sustainability, said: “Since our origins 80 years ago, we have worked every day guided by a very clear philosophy: to build a sustainable, highly productive, and deeply humane company.”

Bimbo’s 2030 targets will ultimately be judged on measurable emissions reductions rather than the number of projects it has underway. More than half a million hectares of regenerative agriculture is substantial, but the 2050 ambition ultimately requires all its key ingredients to come from land using regenerative practices. Likewise, several thousand electric vehicles represent progress without amounting to a decarbonised global distribution network.

The hydrogen experiment is similarly modest when set against the scale of the task. It involved one zone of one oven for two weeks, encountered ignition problems and still requires further engineering. Green hydrogen also remains expensive and scarce in many markets, while direct electrification could ultimately prove more efficient where sufficient low-carbon electricity is available.

That uncertainty may be the most revealing aspect of Bimbo’s approach. A net-zero bakery in Britain, Portugal, Mexico or the US could require very different combinations of fuels, technologies and agricultural systems.

Bimbo has until 2050 to remove net emissions from a global value chain stretching from fields to factories and distribution fleets. Its size gives it the ability to test different solutions across different markets, but it also makes turning successful pilots into everyday practice considerably harder.

The net-zero bakery may ultimately be less futuristic than the phrase suggests. It could be an existing plant using renewable electricity, sourcing wheat grown differently, recovering more wasted heat, running ovens without unabated natural gas and sending bread out in lower-carbon vehicles.

A tunnel oven installed in Portugal in 1998 has shown that one small part of that model can work technically. Whether Bimbo can make the economics work across thousands of production assets, farms and vehicles is the much bigger bet.