Industry Insight 50 years of TOMRA


Kennedy’s Confection speaks with Ken Moynihan, CEO at TOMRA Processed Food, where he tells us all about the company’s mission for a sustainable future


Can you give us a background of TOMRA Food and its mission statement? At TOMRA Food we are on a mission to transform and help our customers feed the world, improve yield, minimise waste, and create sustainable value. More broadly, the whole TOMRA group of companies –


Food, Collection, Recycling, and Mining - share the same philosophy: to transform how we obtain and use the planet’s resources to enable a world without waste. As TOMRA’s tagline states, we are committed to leading the resource revolution in a world where ‘Every Resource Counts’. The background to this mission statement is simple: the global population is growing, yet the planet’s resources are limited. We urgently need to improve sustainability, develop the circular economy, and make more efficient use of resources. TOMRA’s solutions are targeted at helping address these big challenges.


Congratulations on your 50th anniversary - how did it feel to look back on the milestones and developments made at TOMRA since its inception?


TOMRA can be proud of the fact that it has grown from humble beginnings to become a highly respected global market leader. This is living proof of our ability to adapt, innovate, and provide the solutions our customers really need.


TOMRA was founded in Norway in 1972 by brothers Petter


and Tore Planke. After seeing a local grocer struggle with the manual collection of empty bottles in their store, the brothers developed the first fully-automated reverse vending machine (RVM) in their family’s garage. This invention was quickly embraced by retailers and spawned an entire industry for efficiently handling the return and recycling of deposit beverage containers. TOMRA’s pioneering and transformative approach led to its continuing development over the years, from designing and manufacturing RVMs to providing advanced sorting systems for the food, recycling, and mining industries. The 50th anniversary is also a time to look forward, because we are now opening the chapter in TOMRA’s story where we step up our role leading the resource revolution.


Why is sustainability an important topic for TOMRA? Sustainability is important for everyone and for the future of our planet. There’s an urgent need for technology-driven solutions to improve how we use our planet’s resources.


20 Kennedy’s Confection July 2022


“We urgently need to improve sustainability, develop the circular economy, and make more efficient use of resources”


These demand the type of solutions TOMRA provides – solutions which are in ever-greater demand as sustainability gains importance with governments, consumers,


and


businesses, and as the world faces the challenge of producing enough nutritious food to support our growing population.


Each of the Group’s four divisions has declared a collective mission for the future - what is TOMRA Food’s role in this? TOMRA Food is committed to leading the resource revolution in a world where every piece of food counts. The population is growing and we do not have the arable land available to scale with it. We are on a mission to transform and help our customers to feed the world, improving yields, minimising waste, and creating sustainable value. Working closely with customers, we will continue to advance food production, one step at a time.


How has being technology-led and providing customer- tailored solutions helped to push TOMRA to become a pioneering business in sorting and solutions? We are committed to growing with our customers as their partners, and much of that growth is driven by technology. Our customers continuously seek innovative ways to produce the products their customers demand and our role is to both support and to lead in those innovations. TOMRA invests heavily in R&D, and that R&D needs to be very close to our customers’ lives to produce the kind of innovative, customer- centric solutions that we are known for. As a result, more than 12,800 TOMRA units are installed at food growers, packers, and processors worldwide for confectionery, fruit, dried fruit, grains and seeds, potato products, proteins, nuts, and vegetables.


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