Grupo Bimbo puts another 1,001 EVs into Mexican fleets

Baked goods company Grupo Bimbo has announced the addition of another 1,001 electric delivery vehicles to its fleets in Mexico. The Vekstar Stellar electric vans have a payload of 1.3 tonnes and a range of 130 kilometres and are manufactured by its own purpose-built subsidiary Moldex.

With the 1,001 new electric vehicles, Grupo Bimbo will expand its electric fleet in Mexico to more than 2,300 electric vehicles. The company aims to have a total of 4,000 electric vehicles in use by the end of 2024. So far, the company has not disclosed the vehicles’ technical data.

Grupo Bimbo says that its subsidiary Moldex has been producing electric delivery vehicles since 2013. Moldex assembles the Vekstar Stellar vehicles in Lerma, Mexico. Julio Jiménez, Director of Moldex, said, “It was young Mexican engineers who have developed this new Vekstar model, with better performance and greater load capacity, designed according to the needs of Grupo Bimbo. We continue to innovate in order to be an ally that helps this and other companies to achieve their sustainability goals.”

The Mexican company has revealed that 500 of the new electric trucks will be distributed by Bimbo, and the other 501 will be distributed by the Snack subsidiary Barcel. In total, the group now has 2,300 electric vehicles in the country, which it also says are powered by renewable energy. The company envisages the used vehicle batteries to be used as stationary energy storage. The company says that the “vehicles will be distributed to urban areas where this type of clean distribution is most needed” before talking about CO2 output alleviation, which presumably means the vehicles will be used in areas with otherwise high pollution levels.

Although maybe not familiar to many in Europe, Grupo Bimbo is active in North, Central and South America as well as in Asia. According to its own information, the Mexican group is active in a total of 33 countries and claims to be the world’s largest baking goods company.

Grupo Bimbo is currently implementing a strategy that focuses on what it calls “ecological sales centres”. In Mexico, there are already 15 of these locations with solar panels, rainwater collection systems, green walls, natural lighting and emission-free vehicles. The newly acquired vehicles are to be used to realise another 15 such sales centres.

grupobimbo.com (in Spanish)