Agrumaria: from measurement to action on strategy, climate, and the supply chain

Agrumaria is an Italian company founded in 1985 that specializes in citrus processing. With a family history now in its third generation, the company operates today as a structured industrial group with a strong international focus, offering ingredients and tailor-made solutions for the Nutrition, Cosmetics, and Flavor & Fragrance sectors.

Agrumaria employs over 300 people in Italy and Egypt and operates two production facilities—one in Calabria and one in Egypt - ensuring production continuity and supply chain reliability year-round, with more than 160 days of citrus processing annually. The company is supported by sales offices in major global markets, including Algiers, Atlanta, Cairo, Dubai, Frankfurt, Grasse, Nairobi, and Uttar Pradesh (Noida, New Delhi).

Its activities are organized into four integrated product categories - fruit juices and specialties, essential oils and derivatives, flavors and extracts, and integrated fruit-based solutions—serving the Food & Beverage, Flavor & Fragrance, and Cosmetics sectors. R&D is a strategic asset: in-house teams are dedicated to developing new formulations, ingredients, and customized solutions aligned with customer needs and global market trends, with product quality guaranteed by rigorous controls and compliance with international standards.

In 2023, Agrumaria, together with NATIVA, launched a structured initiative to integrate sustainability into its business strategy: a strategy based on impact measurement and built on four pillars - people, community, value chain, and environment.

Every structural transformation begins with measurement. In 2023, Agrumaria analyzed its performance using B Lab’s B Impact Assessment, a tool that provided an accurate snapshot of the company’s impact profile: governance and customer relationships as strengths, and the environment, community, and supply chain as areas requiring focused attention. This analysis led to a three-year improvement plan, which translated sustainability into an operational agenda with defined responsibilities, deadlines, and metrics.

In 2025, the process continued with the first double materiality analysis, conducted according to the methodology set forth by the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), which involved management, suppliers, customers, and employees in assessing the most relevant issues—both in terms of the impacts generated and financial risks and opportunities - revealing a hierarchy of priorities regarding sustainability issues that now guides the company’s strategic decisions.

In February 2025, Agrumaria became a Benefit Corporation: a decision that gave legal form to the management model it had developed, binding its governance to the pursuit of a dual purpose—economic and impact-driven.

Reducing a company’s climate impact first requires knowing where to start. In 2024, NATIVA supported Agrumaria in its first comprehensive assessment of its CO₂ emissions, ranging from direct operations at its facilities to those generated by suppliers and customers.

The results made it clear where to focus efforts. Ninety-seven percent of emissions do not originate internally but from the supply chain—primarily from the purchase of ingredients such as concentrated juices, citrus fruits, and additives, which alone account for more than half of the total. Direct operations—energy, fuels, and heating—account for just 2%. This breakdown has reshaped the company’s priorities: the most significant change will not come from the factories, but from how and what the company purchases.

This realization led to a plan with defined goals: to reduce direct emissions (Scope 1 and 2) by 46% by 2030 and total emissions - including those from the supply chain - by 90% by 2050. The initial efforts focused on energy, where results could be achieved more quickly. A solar power system now covers between 20 and 25% of the plants’ energy needs, while the remainder comes entirely from certified hydroelectric sources. As a result, emissions associated with purchased electricity are now zero. In 2025, the company maintained 100% renewable or low-carbon electricity and achieved a B rating in the CDP Climate Change assessment (SME category).

The introduction of these measurements has raised awareness within the company and set the transformation process in motion. The most significant indicator was the reduction in carbon intensity: in 2025, the metric tons of CO₂e generated per million euros of revenue fell to 474 (location-based; 465 market-based), down 46% from 2024, while intensity per employee stood at 413 tCO₂e, a 34% decrease year-over-year. Agrumaria thus continues to grow while emitting less, decoupling—at least in relative terms - economic growth from environmental impact.

The same rigorous measurement approach now extends to products as well, with an analysis of the carbon footprint of 10 key products according to the ISO 14067 standard, complemented by a strategic life cycle assessment (sLCA). The measurement considers the entire life cycle, going beyond the company’s boundaries and identifying which ingredients and processes have the greatest impact on the final environmental footprint of the products - a level of detail that guides internal development decisions and responds to customers’ increasingly concrete demand to know the environmental impact of what they purchase.

While emissions measurement has shown where the impact is concentrated, the supply chain is where that impact takes shape. The quality of Agrumaria’s ingredients depends on a network of partners ranging from local producers to international stakeholders, and it is precisely here that the most significant part of the decarbonization process plays out - but that’s not all. Working conditions, agricultural practices, and the traceability of materials are issues that cut across the entire value chain and that the dual materiality framework has confirmed as priorities.

The work began in 2024 with the use of the proprietary NATIVA SCAIT (Supply Chain Assessment & Improvement Tool) for a strategic analysis that mapped dependencies, risks, and opportunities throughout the supply chain. Based on that mapping, operational tools were developed in 2025: a Code of Conduct for suppliers with explicit criteria on social and environmental standards, and a system to evaluate their performance over time.

At the end of 2024, Agrumaria took another step toward internationalization and greater supply chain resilience by expanding its production processes to Egypt, a key country for citrus supply. In doing so, it entered a new production context, different from the Italian one: a new agricultural supply chain to learn about, new people to engage, and new practices to establish. This was not a relocation but a direct expansion, with the same level of complexity as the work carried out in Italy. For this reason, the sustainability journey at the Egyptian site began with the people. Together with NATIVA, Agrumaria launched the initiative through three days of interactive workshops and in-person training sessions involving the entire company, to share the language, meaning, and priorities of the sustainability strategy.

From there, the work continues: building awareness day by day and progressively extending the same guidelines followed in Italy - measurement, decarbonization, and supply chain evolution—to the Egyptian site.

“Embarking on the journey toward becoming a Benefit Corporation and achieving B Corp certification with NATIVA has meant transforming the values of Agrumaria’s family history into a concrete and measurable commitment. It is a journey that places people, the environment, and communities at the center of how we do business, with a long-term vision focused on future generations.”— Fresia Messi, Sustainability Expert, Agrumaria