Emco is a family business situated in beautiful countryside outside Prague in the heart of Europe. Ever since it was established in 1990 it has been managed by family members who put their passion and dedication into producing natural healthy Emco products.
Emco is also one of the largest independent distributor of branded foods in the Czech and Slovak Republic.
Delivering tasty and healthy products is part of Emco’s DNA. We have already removed palm oil from our portfolio and started offering vegetable protein products. We were the first to come up with sugar-free crunchy müsli and have launched alternative no-sugar-added lines of products in all our main categories (müsli, porridge, biscuits and bars). We have won several “Reformulation of the Year” awards for these innovative products.
Our products come in various types of packaging. We already use fully recyclable packaging for 74% of all our products, including all müsli, biscuits, bars, oats and cereals for children, and all our cartons are made of 90% of recycled materials.
All Emco products are made from our own oats sourced exclusively from Czech farms. We feel that we should strive to ensure that farmers grow our oats in line with the principles of good landscape management, focusing on issues such as water retention, soil erosion and the size of the area under cultivation. We have worked with our largest supplier of Czech oats to set up very high standards of care for the soil where our oats grow.
We also buy sugar and rapeseed oil – our most important raw materials apart from oats – exclusively from Czech producers.
As part of our sustainability drive, we have recently started to focus more closely also on our production processes. Our first step is achieving partial energy self-sufficiency. In 2023, we set up a photovoltaic power plant on the roof of our production plant in Hrdly. The energy it generates will cover approximately 20% of our annual consumption. We are already thermally self-sufficient in our other production plant in Vřesce, where we use waste materials from our production line to generate all the heat that we need to keep the line going. We strive to gradually eliminate all energy losses in the production hall so as to reduce our energy consumption. It is also a matter of course for us not to waste any food in our production.
Our goal is to extend the share of renewable energy in Hrdly plant to up to 40% of the annual consumption and to work tirelessly on improving the immediate surroundings of our facilities, whether by planting new greenery or by increasing the quality of wastewater.