How Is SAP Supporting Regulatory Compliance for Adam Foods?

SAP offers many cloud-based sustainability tools to help organisations transition to low-carbon and circular operations.

Its solutions have helped Adam Foods, which creates and markets cookies, broths, pastries, honey and bread to supply customers in more than 75 countries.

By using SAP’s sustainability tools, the company has been able to ensure compliance with Spanish circularity regulations and operate responsibly.

Tackling Spain’s plastic tax

In 2023, Spain introduced its plastic tax, which imposes a €0.45 (US$0.53) rate per kilogram on non-reusable plastic packaging.

This covers items including tableware, plastic wrap and food containers, as part of the country’s circular economy law.

To abide by and go beyond this regulation, Adam Foods aimed to expand its international reporting capabilities while ensuring circularity principles continue to guide its decision making.

Adam Foods chose the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution and used Minsait – one of SAP’s partners – to lead the implementation of the change.

Through this development, the company aimed to provide packaging data, automate manual tax-form generation and make tracking more efficient.

Isidro Rodriguez Ureña, IT and Digital Transformation Lead at Adam Foods, says: “SAP Responsible Design and Production improved our packaging data visibility by creating one master data source.

“We can now generate tax forms in-house to meet Spain’s plastic tax mandate and proactively prepare for upcoming regulations affecting our business in Portugal, Hungary, Romania and Poland.”

About SAP Responsible Design and Production

SAP Responsible Design and Production is a supply chain management tool which helps calculate extended producer responsibility (EPR) obligations, plastic taxes and corporate commitments.

It provides insights that give decision makers a lifecycle view into the costs and impacts of their design choices.

The benefits of SAP’s system includes enabling companies to deliver on their sustainability commitments, calculate fees and taxes accurately and transition to a circular product portfolio with zero waste.

Julie Barrier, Global Vice President, Sustainability Marketing at SAP, said on LinkedIn: “While everyone is in the process of planning and strategising for the new year, we’re continuing to deliver customer stories that highlight the business value our customers are realising with the SAP Sustainability software.

“With SAP Responsible Design and Production enabling a single source of packaging data, Adam Foods can now track regulatory impacts, optimise materials for sustainable packaging and efficiently manage and meet Spain’s plastic tax obligations in compliance with EU regulations.”

Creating impact in the logistics chain

Phase one of Adam Foods’s project involved analysing the company’s logistics chain, allowing it to report on EPR fees and plastic taxes.

The implementation of the project also helped improve document and invoice tracking, which was a key issue for the company.

With data from SAP’s solution, Adam Foods can analyse regulatory impacts on packaging throughout its supply chain and make decisions on more environmentally friendly packaging models.

Adam Foods expects to recover 100% of its solution investment due to its reduced tax liability as a result of using SAP’s system.

Elena Castell, Tax Manager at Adam Foods, says: “Thanks to the new functionality provided by SAP Responsible Design and Production, we can now generate tax forms and track our logistics documents and invoices.

“In just the first year of filing, we expect to recover 100% of the investment through the tax benefits resulting from reliable master and transactional data.”

In phase two of the project, Adam Foods is planning to roll out SAP Responsible Design and Production to Portugal, Hungary, Romania and Poland.

It is currently working on staying ahead of Spanish regulations by continuing to incorporate supplier sustainability data, running analytics to gain deeper insights and training users to create different EPR reports.