PEZ can be shared, PEZ is fun to play with, and PEZ is a treat for all ages. In short, PEZ puts a smile on people’s faces! However, as a future-oriented company, it is not just important to us that our customers enjoy PEZ. We also want to be a responsible employer and business partner and help maintain an intact environment.

As a company which primarily makes products for children, providing our employees with a family-friendly working environment is a priority of ours. We want to make it as easy as possible for young parents who work for us to reconcile their professional and family commitments. This includes offering flexible part-time working models, a policy on working from home, and company childcare facilities near the site in Traun. Most of the managers at PEZ are parents themselves, so they understand the joys and challenges that can come with having children.

Incidentally, more than half of our managers are women.

We have been doing business with many of our suppliers for years. Before a company starts suppling PEZ, it must guarantee that it complies with high standards covering aspects including occupational health and safety, fair pay and environmental protection. To ensure that these requirements are met at all times, PEZ visits its suppliers unannounced to perform spot checks.

When we source the ingredients for our candy, we strive to keep distances as short as possible, so more than 95% of these raw materials come from the European Union. The majority of the sugar is procured from Austria.

Critical raw materials, such as palm oil, are only used by PEZ if they are absolutely essential for technical reasons relating to the production process. Our use of palm oil as a pressing additive stands at 0.6%. All of the palm oil we utilise is certified by the RSPO to ensure that sustainable growing practices are used.

When we design the packaging for PEZ candy, the most important consideration is product protection. This ensures that you always receive a product in the same, flawless quality – wherever you are in the world.

We protect our products using a combination of cardboard and blister. We have switched to using a raw material made from 80% recycled PET for these blisters in 2022. The innermost and outermost layers of the blisters have to be made from virgin PET to ensure that the material can be processed smoothly at our production facilities.

Our blister cards have been made from 86% recycled paper for many years. The two parts of the packaging – the blister and the cardboard – are very easy to separate. Our cardboard boxes consist of up to 99% recycled fibre. All of the printing inks we use for our product packaging are free from mineral oils.

Our bags are made from the recyclable monomaterial polypropylene. By reducing the material thickness to the minimum necessary and making our bags smaller, we have succeeded in reducing the amount of packaging material. 

We are constantly looking for other environmentally friendly alternatives in conjunction with packaging and sustainability experts. As soon as we have found an option which also guarantees the necessary product protection, we will switch to this to take sustainability at PEZ to the next level.

All of our packaging is made in the EU – most of it within a 350-kilometre radius of our production plants.

PEZ has taken a lot of steps in recent years to lower its energy usage. For instance, special attention is paid to energy efficiency during the acquisition of new machinery. The process used to heat water at our largest production site is energy self-sufficient: waste heat from our refrigeration systems is used to heat the water and solar power is generated by panels on the roof. This enables us to heat all the water needed at the site without using any additional energy.

The waste heat from the machines that produce our candy and dispensers is used to heat the production building and warehouse. This supplies 80% of the heating energy needed. We are also careful to conserve plastic during the production of PEZ dispensers: sprues which are created during injection moulding and are considered a waste product are immediately ground down and mixed with the granules again. This minimises waste.