Founded in Paris in 1923, STEF has become the European reference for temperature-controlled food logistics. The group transports, stores and delivers fresh, frozen and thermosensitive products for producers, manufacturers, retailers and foodservice operators, through nearly 260 sites in eight countries. It is an industry where the margin for error is close to zero: a break in the cold chain is not a service incident, it is a food safety event.
In 2025, that model delivered. Fourth-quarter revenue came in at €1.347 billion, up 7.1%, and full-year revenue at €5.119 billion, up 6.6%. With that performance the group reached the €5 billion target set in its 2022-2026 strategic plan a full year ahead of schedule, driven by volume growth in France, a strong dynamic in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Hitting a five-year target in four years changes the question a leadership team is asked: it is no longer whether the plan lands, but what the organization is now capable of committing to next.
STEF in 2025
A plan that runs on how teams work together
Engagés pour un avenir durable is built on five strategic inflexions that place CARE at the center of the group’s relationships, internal and external alike, and combine financial performance with social and environmental commitments.
“Teams committed every day to sustainably and safely guarantee access to food diversity for all.”
2022-2026 strategic plan: five inflexions
With OpenDecide, STEF started at the very top: the CDO Comex. That choice is deliberate. A group’s operating standard is set at the level of its executive committee. A leadership collective that functions well makes excellence reproducible below it; one that does not exports its ambiguity to every level underneath.
Deployment, from the top to the field
From there, momentum is building steadily across the group’s Business Units. Every collective that comes on board gains what the Comex gained first: a clear, shared read of its own functioning, and the means to raise its own standard. That is how operational excellence becomes reproducible from one Business Unit to the next, and how the performance of the strategic plan is built, team by team.
The next plan starts with the collectives
A target reached a year early is a starting point, not a finish line. What a group does with that kind of margin depends far less on its warehouses and its fleet than on the quality of the collectives that will define and deliver the plan that follows.
For a company whose purpose is to guarantee sustainable, safe access to food diversity for all, that work is not abstract. It is what makes 21,000 people across eight countries hold the same standard, one collective at a time.