Heroes of change contest 2025: discover our 2 winning CSR projects!

For the past five years, the Heroes of Change CSR contest has been celebrating the commitment of the Group’s employees around the world every year. A showcase for local CSR initiatives, this contest embodies the dynamics of Newrest’s teams and highlights the concrete actions that shape the company’s CSR approach.

For this 2025 edition, the candidate projects have been divided into two categories:

1. CSR revelations: precise and/or beginning actions
2. CSR Champions: durable and cross-disciplinary actions

More than 30 projects from more than 20 countries participated in the competition. Ten of them were then shortlisted to present their project to the jury of the contest. Their votes as well as those of the employees resulted in the election of the two winning projects, which can be discovered below.

This year’s winners are:

• CSR Revelations – Costa Rica with the Esperanza project
• CSR Champions – Zambia with the Nourish & Flourish Project

Since May 2025, Newrest Costa Rica has been supporting the Hogar Siembra Foundation, an organization that supports young women victims of violence. As part of the Esperanza project, the unit buys cakes and uniforms made by the young women of the foundation. In addition to providing them with an income, this initiative contributes to their training in pastry and offers them concrete professional opportunities. Newrest Costa Rica thus contributes to their economic empowerment while supporting the foundation’s operations.

In Zambia, the Nourish & Flourish project was launched in May 2024 in collaboration with Loctaguna, a local farm that promotes sustainable agricultural practices with which Newrest Zambia has been partnering for several years. The goal is to support a local orphanage by combining nutrition, well-being and physical activity. Healthy and balanced meals are prepared from the products of the partner farm and from the vegetable garden, managed by Newrest employees, located next to the unit. A concrete and sustainable initiative supporting children in need.

This selection proved to be tough given the strong commitment of all the projects presented, in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility.

Among the shortlisted initiatives included culinary training for students, building schools for children with disabilities, and developing self-sufficient hydration systems.

A big thank you to all the participants for their commitment, and to the employees for their votes.

See you in 2026 for a new edition of the Heroes of Change contest, full of discoveries!

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

• Heroes of Change contest 2023: discover our 2 winning CSR projects!
• Heroes of Change contest 2024: discover our 2 winning CSR projects!