The event centered on the 2025 winners of BCSDH’s For a Sustainable Future Award, using their examples to show how companies can move sustainability from isolated projects into strategy, operations, and market-facing business solutions. It also served as the lead-in to the 2026 application period, which opened on May 18 and runs until July 18, with the council urging companies to submit cases demonstrating measurable progress and broader applicability.
Held at the Budapest office of regional law firm Kinstellar, the breakfast brought together past award winners and business executives. The format was built around two questions that increasingly dominate corporate sustainability debates: how can companies move beyond internal targets, and how can individual examples be turned into wider systems-level change?
Balázs Sepsey, office managing partner at Kinstellar Budapest, welcomed participants as host of the breakfast. The event was organized by the BCSDH, with its managing director Irén Márta moderating the main discussions. The program was designed to provide a closer view of the 2025 award-winning entries while encouraging stronger applications for the 2026 cycle, the 10th time the award will be presented.
“The world to which we adapted our companies, business models and systems no longer exists,” said Attila Chikán Jr., president of BCSDH and CEO of Alteo Group. “The challenges are growing, and companies are already feeling the increasingly strong impact of climate change in their everyday operations. That makes rapid action and the faster transformation of our systems into more sustainable and resilient ones indispensable.”
Chikán said the award and the breakfast were intended to encourage executives to integrate sustainability into decision-making and to develop business solutions that go beyond business as usual. The broader aim, he added, is to support models that can be extended to other actors in the business sector, thereby accelerating systemic change.
That emphasis gave the morning a more practical tone than a conventional awards follow-up would have. Rather than presenting sustainability as a communications exercise, BCSDH framed it as a management issue: one that requires credible leaders, measurable corporate transformation and examples that other companies can adapt.
An executive roundtable focused on the role of leadership in embedding sustainability across companies rather than leaving it inside isolated departments. Moderated by Márta, the discussion brought together László Fazekas, deputy CEO for finance at MVM Zrt.; Tamás Kaibinger, company director of Lidl Hungary; Rudolf Semsei, owner and managing director of VakVarjú Restaurants, Budapest Party Service and Dobay Confectioneries; and Ágnes Rakó, managing director and partner at KPMG Tanácsadó Kft.
The composition of the panel underlined one of the event’s central messages: sustainability is no longer confined to a narrow group of ESG specialists. It is now relevant to energy, retail, hospitality, professional services and supply chains, and its implementation depends heavily on whether senior management treats it as a core business issue.
Márta said BCSDH is continually seeking ways to accelerate sustainability processes and help corporate leaders drive systemic change. She also noted that one of the breakfast’s explicit aims was to show credible change leaders, creative new business models and practical solutions from earlier award winners, so that this year’s applicants would have concrete examples to build on.
The second part of the program moved from leadership to business solutions. Grundfos presented its Green Future Innovation program, with environmental engineer Szilvia Gärtner explaining the initiative. Gábor Ligeti, operating company chief engineer at Heineken, presented the company’s Net Zero Production program.
The two cases reflected BCSDH’s broader argument that sustainability becomes relevant for systemic change only when it produces solutions that other companies can understand, adapt or scale. In that sense, the event treated the award not simply as recognition for past performance, but as a way to identify working models that can be transferred across the businesscommunity.
The 2026 award will continue to focus on areas where companies can have an outsized impact on systems transformation. The main categories cover change leadership, women leaders, corporate transformation and business models or business solutions. The latter area includes fields such as the circular economy, climate protection and adaptation, biodiversity preservation and restoration, and human values.
For companies, the practical question is whether sustainability is still treated as a separate compliance or brand issue or has become part of investment, procurement, operations and leadership culture. The examples discussed at the breakfast suggested that the difference increasingly lies in execution: whether companies can turn climate and social commitments into operating models that survive cost pressure, regulatory change and market uncertainty.
The timing of the event also matters. As climate-related risks become more visible in day-to-day business, companies face growing pressure to show not only that they have targets, but that they are changing how they work. BCSDH’s message was that credible examples are already available in Hungary, but the next stage requires broader adoption and faster scaling.
By linking the 2025 award winners with the launch of the 2026 application period, the breakfast positioned the For a Sustainable Future Award as more than a recognition scheme. It is being used as a platform to identify business leaders and corporate solutions that can help move sustainability from individual company achievements toward wider market practice.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of May 22, 2026.
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