CEO & Chairman of the Executive Board, GEA Group AG
gea ceo stefan klebert is attending 2 video
Stephan good to talk to you. Thanks for joining us I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of people that haven't heard of GEA.
About Stefan Klebert
Stefan Klebert, CEO of GEA Group, has emphasized the company’s commitment to sustainability. In a March 2025 appearance, Klebert said that GEA has set targets to achieve climate neutrality by 2040, with a goal of reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 60% from a 2019 baseline by 2026, and that the company was at a 58% reduction as of the time of his remarks. He stated that Scope 1, 2, and 3 emission reduction targets are included in executive board compensation, which he said he believed to be unique among German companies. He also noted that 98.4% of shareholders approved the company’s climate plan at the annual general meeting. Klebert said the company views sustainability as an obligation, not just a growth strategy. During the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Klebert said GEA’s business in food, beverage, and pharmaceutical machinery would remain in demand regardless of the crisis, telling investors that “people need to eat and drink.” He expressed optimism about long-term trends in food production, citing population growth and urbanization. Klebert also said GEA works with customers on food safety, traceability, and energy efficiency, and described sustainability efforts as “a journey rather than a destination.” In earlier Davos interviews, he described GEA as a technology supplier focused on collaboration and reliability rather than low cost.
Transcript (26 segments)
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Narrator0:00
GEA is one of the largest technology suppliers for food processing and a wide range of other industries including dairy farming and beverages. They've been around for over a hundred years with nearly 19,000 employees and consolidated revenues in 2018 of around 4.8 billion euros.
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Andrew Wilson0:17
I'm Andrew Wilson and I'm in Davos to talk to a company that says its engineering for a better world.
Stefan, good to talk to you. Thanks for joining us. I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of people that haven't heard of GEA. But given that you had 5 billion turnover in 2018, you're a significant company. Tell me a bit about GEA.
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Stefan Klebert0:45
GEA is a quite experienced company. We started in 1881, so we are around for a while and GEA is active in the area of food processing, beverages, dairy farming, dairy processing. So everything which has to do with food and beverage or also with pharmaceuticals. This is our business. We do the machineries and the service and the processes for customers who are producing final products for the end-users.
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Andrew Wilson1:14
And I suppose the company has been around so long, there must be quite an evolution.
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Stefan Klebert1:20
Yeah, absolutely. There was quite an evolution. So the company was also active in chemicals, in mining. There is a lot of heritage in this company, but we focused during the last 10 to 20 years, I would say, very much on the fields I mentioned and today we have about 70% of our focus on food and beverage only.
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Andrew Wilson1:44
Front and center of your company message is this phrase 'engineering for a better world'. Tell me what that message means.
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Stefan Klebert1:50
Yeah, absolutely. So we have really a lot of brilliant, dedicated and committed engineers all over the world and this is what is a strength of GEA because we want all our engineers looking for better solutions for a better world. That means we want to have sustainability, we want to have healthy food. And you know that there are a lot of trends going on in the industry, and people demand more healthy food, for instance, more sustainability, and this is all what our engineers do.
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Andrew Wilson2:22
Interesting. You used that word sustainability. I was going to ask you about that. Tell me a bit more about sustainability within your company.
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Stefan Klebert2:28
I mean sustainability is a big issue nowadays and sustainability has a lot to do with environment but also with economy, with many, many things and for us it's rather a journey than a destination. So we always try to become better in providing products for our customers which consumes less energy. Or we also have developed products where customers can operate our machineries with neutral wastewater for instance, things like that.
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Andrew Wilson3:03
Give me an idea about how active you are in the food processing business. For example, an example of the kind of work you do there.
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Stefan Klebert3:10
For instance we do pasta machineries, so if you eat good nice pasta, this is very likely made in our machines. If you drink milk or yogurt or ice cream, these are all things which are made on our machines or beer. Also many, many wines are separated or the candid with our machinery. So these are examples. We also are active in the area of smoothies. All these are products which are coming from our machines.
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Andrew Wilson3:41
It's interesting. Looking from the outside, the smoothie operator, he knows about his smoothie, he asks you for the machines to help him make it. And likewise any other kind of product or pasta constructor. But there must be an element of collaboration. They come to you and you say there's this way of doing it or have you considered this way?
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Stefan Klebert3:56
Absolutely. We have a lot of laboratories in our sites worldwide where customers are coming, where we test together with them what is the best process to achieve the result they want to achieve and then we scale it up. So we have a lot of smaller devices where we can test how it works. If we do for instance milk powder or infant formula made out of milk powder, we have smaller spray dryers and we test it. And once we have the result, we need develop together with our customer, then we scale it up to the huge production line.
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Andrew Wilson4:34
So aside from food production, what other areas are you busy in, for instance?
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Stefan Klebert4:39
We also in the area of pharmaceuticals. So we produce machineries for tablet presses. We also have a very special technology, for instance. We do deep freezers for medical, so we can take out the whole liquid from the medicine and what remains is a kind of powder which you can transport also to countries like Africa without cooling and you simply add some water, you shake it, and you have back your medicine. Things like that.
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Andrew Wilson5:06
How much is digitization, data, artificial intelligence? How much is that getting involved in your work now?
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Stefan Klebert5:14
Of course, it's also a big issue nowadays. Interestingly, you know we have a division called farm technology where we start in a farm with the milking process. We have automatic milking systems where we have a lot of digitization because all the cows have a transponder so we know all the cows, let's say by name, and they come, we know how much milk they gave, we know what kind of food they need to give us the best milk. So there's a lot of digitization around this process.
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Andrew Wilson5:54
What makes people come to you? There must be all sorts of possibilities in terms of plant machinery processing and so on. What kind of relationship do you have with the end products?
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Stefan Klebert6:03
I would say we have very, very good and long-lasting relationships with big global well-known brands because they know GEA as a technology and engineering company. We are well known in our industry as a very reliable and experienced producer of machineries. We are not the cheapest one. We are really based on technology and experience and our customers love how we execute projects. We are reliable. We have a lot of dedicated engineers and staff working on the side with such a variety of projects.
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Andrew Wilson6:37
How do you keep the coherence within the company, the kind of the company message or the ethos? How do you keep that?
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Stefan Klebert6:42
Yeah, I mean, we are quite a complex company, let's say to be honest, but we trust on a lot of very dedicated speedboats, let's say, which we have in our conglomerate and we have a lot of really very educated and brilliant entrepreneurs within our company and they do completely different businesses, but they all belong to the big GEA crew.
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Andrew Wilson7:10
Stefan, final thought. Everyone's concerned about food production long term on the planet now. I mean, what are your concerns? Are you optimistic for the future?
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Stefan Klebert7:17
I'm very optimistic because there is a need to feed the world, that's very clear. Population is growing and there is also a trend to more healthy food and there is a trend of urbanization. So there are many challenges we have in this industry and we are working very much together with our customers. How can we make food safer? It has something to do with traceability of food, with keeping food longer fresh, that we can transport it without cooling because cooling consumes energy. This is not sustainable. So things like that are on our minds and this is what we are working on.
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Andrew Wilson7:57
Definitely. Thanks very much. Good to talk to you.
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Stefan Klebert7:57
Thank you very much.