Food & beverage companies that open their doors to making their processing plants more sustainable have a Las Vegas buffet-like set of opportunities — and no matter what they choose, they’re likely to get some bottom-line benefit from their team’s effort.
Sustainability nowadays has almost circled back to the pre-buzzword era, when companies simply sought out ways to make plants run more efficiently, minimizing resources and inputs needed and maintaining the environment around which its supply chain operated. And there are victories, big and small, still to be achieved — no matter the size of the company or the facility.
Whittling away food waste
Reduction of food waste may seem like a consumer-focused opportunity, and Feeding America says 92 billion pounds of food goes to waste every year — 51.7% of that comes from the food industry itself, which includes more than just the processors. However, food & beverage companies aren’t taking their role in reducing food waste lightly.
The meat industry is known for following the mantra of using “everything but the squeal,” yet it isn’t always that simple to follow that strategy. Meat and poultry processors constantly seek ways to maximize the yield and value of each animal it processes, says Gary Malenke, senior vice president-pork operations for Perdue Premium Meat Co. (PPMC).
“We focus on using every part of the animal possible to help reduce food waste,” he explains. “For items that customers don’t want or can’t use — bones, for example — we send those to a rendering operation and then sell the rendered product to the feed industry so that, again, no animal material ends up in the trash.”
PPMC also works to help its customers reduce food waste after the product leaves its docks, by continuously exploring ways to improve shelf life of its products, Malenke adds, whether through R&D methods to improve safety and quality, or improving the chilling and refrigeration of those products to sustain them longer.
At Fresh Del Monte’s North Portland, Ore., processing plant, management conducted a six-month food waste employee engagement program, asking them to suggest solutions that would upcycle byproducts that usually end up as food waste. Employees submitted 197 ideas, the company noted, with 75% of the workforce participating in the effort.
The three ideas that were picked ended up allowing Fresh Del Monte to turn 53.2% of its cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, pineapple and watermelon waste into nearly 5,000 additional 6-oz. fresh fruit containers over a seven-week trial period. The company instituted a new receiving process for fresh produce and a change to the inspection location at the plant to achieve this reduction.
Shining brightly
When Aaron Anker became co-owner of granola, trail mix and nuts processor Grandy’s Organics (then called Grandy Oats) in 2000, he and his business partner had grand plans from the start — revolving around growing the company with sustainability of all types at the forefront. That year, they renovated a dairy barn they purchased at auction to become their bakery facility, and 15 years later, they had outgrown the space.
In 2015, Grandy purchased an old schoolhouse building with about 10,000 sq. ft. of floorspace and the surrounding 8.5-acre property in Hiram, Maine. The company turned the schoolhouse into its bakery facility and added a 2,000-sq.-ft. warehouse on top of the building. But the sustainability capstone came outside, where Grandy took the old athletic fields and installed 288 solar panels — at a time when private solar power generation was still a fledgling industry.
“At that moment, it was a pretty gutsy move, since there wasn’t a lot going on with solar,” Anker says. “We had this chance to refurbish this building and start from new, and I tell food processors all the time that if you get the chance to start fresh, then consider doing it the right way, like we did.”
At first, Grandy’s solar field supplied all the power the facility needed. But growth continued and today about 50% of the power the plant needs comes from its own solar panels.
“We thought about adding more solar panels,” Anker adds, “but today it doesn’t make as much sense because there are many more solar fields; so you’re better off buying solar power and being a part of the grid.”
No matter the size of the company or the facility, Anker advises that food and beverage processors look at sustainability projects with a long-term lens, saying, point blank, that he describes himself as “an incrementalist.”
“You don't have to do it all overnight,” he says. “You can always add more solar panels; you can always improve operational efficiencies, which is what we're doing now.”
Anker reports that Grandy is adding more efficient ovens and dishwashers, which it expects will help further reduce the plant’s energy and water consumption.
No stopping sustainability
Indeed, for many companies, sustainability remains a bar to be raised continuously. PPMC, for instance, is drilling down further into its water and energy use, going even deeper than some of its peers. On water usage, most plants will meter and analyze incoming water supply where the main meets the facility. But Malenke says PPMC wanted to go with the flow, in a sense, and measure results further into its Sioux Center, Iowa, processing plant.
“How do you really understand where all that water is being used, instead of making arbitrary estimates of how much is used in each area?” he says. “We have about 30 to 40 water meters in this plant to tell us how much water each process uses, and then we can trend data and watch for changes.”
He doesn’t consider adding more meters to measure operations to be invasive or particularly challenging, especially given the data it can offer and guidance they can glean from it. And that mentality and approach isn’t limited to water.
Malenke notes that PPMC has begun to implement a program that can measure the electricity being used by a specific motor and send alerts in real time to operators or managers if that usage falls outside set parameters. From a sustainability standpoint, if bearings are going out or there’s a misalignment of a conveyor or something that would make the motor work harder, that’s more energy being used.
“Let’s face it: The operator can’t see that a motor is running hot or pulling too hard, and they don’t know until it’s too late and the motor fails,” he says. “This gives real-time data that gives a double benefit for the facility to zero in on — they lower their energy usage and optimize their uptime from an operations standpoint.”
Predictive maintenance efforts get a major assist with this type of program, offering the opportunity to troubleshoot problems before they cause a total line stoppage, leading to down time and/or unsafe conditions. Equipment running efficiently and smoothly leads to incremental sustainability gains. Malenke reminds that even as the industry advances, there will always be more to come.
“In the next 10 years, people are going to figure out ways to be even more sustainable than we are today,” he says. “There's no doubt about it, and that will be nothing but beneficial.”
