Continuous improvement thanks to our team spirit and focus on sustainability.”

2022, an eventful year

We thought that 2022 would be a more ‘normal’ year, until it became clear how big the impact of the conflict in Ukraine actually was. Infl ation skyrocketed. Add to that the failed harvests of some of our main ingredients and the price increase of animal proteins, and there is no denying that 2022 was marked by numerous macroeconomic challenges.

The pass-through of infl ation took a lot of took a lot of time and energy from our teams, but will make our business model and the entire chain more sustainable in the long term. ‘Let’s turn the challenge into an opportunity to strengthen our future’ became our slogan. More flexible than ever, we reinvented ourselves. For What’s Cooking? as a company, but also for our clients and consumers.

To enable us to respond more internally recruited our sustainability manager, enabling to changing circumstances, our contracts are often short-term. Some also include an infl ation adjustment mechanism for certain key ingredients, triggering a more automated pass-through of infl ation and defl ation of fluctuating input costs infl ation and defl ation of fluctuating input costs. While it didn’t prevent our results from falling back in 2022, it will make them more resilient for the future.

Positive change

A lot of great things also happened at What’s Cooking? last year. We further reduced our debt and financing cost and are taking important steps in our sustainability journey. We are genuinely proud of our achievements, and of the warm reception of our sustainability project within our group.

With sustainability as a central value in our new strategy, an exciting future awaits us. We are striving to take on a leadership role in our sector, specifically with our savoury food and ready meals.

In the first half of 2022, we internally recruited our sustainability manager, enabling us to shift gears quickly and to inspire others for the project. From then on, there was no stopping us. We distilled our double materiality matrix from an extensive stakeholder survey and peer review, taking into account all factors that play a role within the sector.

Fighting for ESG, day by day

We quickly gained more insight into our action items, i.e. our ESG criteria (Environmental, Social and Governance). We also aligned our new, more sustainable strategy internally. And we proved that sustainability is a strategic matter to us by having our ExCom meetings focus on sustainability in addition to product quality and employee safety.

E, S and G: we decided to tackle each letter individually. The ‘G’ is also reflected in our establishment of a sustainability committee within the board. As a smaller listed company, we are relatively unique in this respect. But the ‘G’ doesn’t stop with us. Together with our purchasing colleagues and legal department, we looked at how we can assume our role within the chain and extend our ethical code of conduct both internally and externally.

We are also progressing with respect to social issues (S). We continuously focus on employee engagement and have launched multidisciplinary working groups to make our working environment even more enjoyable. We embrace diversity on our sites and support local initiatives. The organic growth of those initiatives is the living proof that our people are the driving force.

We launched a series of initiatives for ‘E’ as well. For example, our ‘YES WE CARE’ project which calls for less energy consumption. But as What’s Cooking, we want to go even further. From 2024, we only want to use energy from renewable sources, reduce food waste in the entire chain, make our recipes more sustainable, ... These are just a few of our goals. We set the bar high but we’re sure that teamwork will help us achieve everything we aim for.

Sustainability on every employee’s plate

At What’s Cooking?, each and every one of our employees is part of the sustainability team. We believe that is the only way in which we can truly make a difference. Sustainability should not be an assignment but a passion. We need that mentality to kickstart the sustainability movement and inspire all our stakeholders. Finance has a connecting role within the company and establishes relationships with and between HR, purchasing, sales, production, engineering, legal services, communications, R&D, sustainability, marketing, quality, safety and ICT. Every team contributes to our sustainability efforts, as do our external stakeholders, which is what makes it so exciting.

Strategy and sustainability, hand in hand

We are strongly committed to the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), ESRS (European Sustainable Reporting Standards), EU Taxonomy, CSDDD (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) and other reports that are in the making for our company. In the meantime, we are working with a system that facilitates a professional follow-up of those reports and our own targets (which arise from our strategy). This way, we create a win-win situation, namely: a thorough focus on the collected data and a link with and follow-up of our strategic objectives. Our finance team also plays a pivotal role in helping us build a sustainability mindset.

Finance as a connector

The collaboration between our finance department and other teams makes it a lot easier to standardise or make processes more sustainable, and thus to be a real business partner for our internal and external clients, as well as for our suppliers. 2022 was no different: we communicated transparently about our cost structure, actively worked on infl ation simulations, and ensured that the calculation of price increases is now fast and automated – certainly not the easiest challenge in a business with limited margins and a large number of SKUs.

We look back with pride on what we have already achieved in the short term.

In 2023, we will continue to focus on the link between data and information, and we will devise action items to improve the What’s Cooking? sustainable growth strategy. We already look forward to our first sustainability report in 2024!

Yves Regniers CFO

What’s Cooking? Annual report 2022

Eric Kamp, COO