For years, energy and sustainability sat firmly in the “cost to be managed” column of the food and beverage and FMCG manufacturer’s ledger. A regulatory obligation, a line item to trim, rarely a source of competitive advantage. That framing is shifting fast.
With wholesale energy prices still volatile, ESOS audits to satisfy (Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme – a mandatory UK energy assessment scheme for large undertakings. Qualifying organisations must conduct an energy audit every four years, covering buildings, industrial processes and transport, and report compliance to the Environment Agency.), Scope 1 and 2 targets to hit and customers asking ever-harder questions about carbon, the manufacturers pulling ahead are the ones treating sustainability as an operational lever rather than a compliance chore.
The opportunity is bigger than most sites realise and it starts with something surprisingly basic: knowing where the energy actually goes, writes Simon Clark, Founder & CEO at Julius & Clark, Operational Consultants. The visibility gap
Almost every factory knows what the whole site consumes; the monthly utility bill makes sure of that. Far fewer know how much energy a particular part of a site (processing or packaging) or an oven, chiller, compressor or a packing line draws, or how that varies by shift, product and time of day. That blind spot is expensive.
Industry estimates suggest a typical mid-sized plant wastes 15 to 25% of its energy through inefficiencies that never surface on a single master meter. Compressed-air leaks running for months, motors idling under partial load, refrigeration and heating quietly working against each other out of hours. Machine-level sub-metering typically reveals enough of this to cut energy costs by 12 to 18% without replacing a single piece of capital equipment.
The point isn’t data for its own sake. It’s that granular visibility across: goods-in, primary and secondary processing, packaging and goods-out that turns vague intentions into specific, fundable decisions. Once you can see that one line is twice as energy-intensive as its twin, or that chillers are running flat out during a quiet night shift, you can redesign how and when the work happens.
What good looks like
The leaders in this sector are already demonstrating the principle. At Nestlé’s coffee factory in Tutbury, in the UK the business monitors energy use across the plant and recovers value from its own waste, burning spent coffee grounds (around 50,000 tonnes a year) to generate steam that powers part of the site. It’s a neat illustration of a wider truth: the cheapest, greenest unit of energy is the one you never have to buy, and the second cheapest is the one you’ve already paid for and can reuse.
Heat reuse is where some of the biggest wins sit. Heinz, backed by the UK Government’s Industrial Energy Transformation Fund, is installing heat pumps at its largest European plant to capture waste heat from existing processes and use it to heat water, cutting both emissions and energy bills, and freeing up cash to reinvest elsewhere. The same logic extends to water and electricity: recovering heat from refrigeration condensers, reusing process water where food-safety rules allow, and smoothing demand to dodge peak-price penalties.
It needn’t all require heavy capital, either. At Birds Eye owner Nomad Foods’ Lowestoft site in the UK, a combination of 100 per cent green electricity, water-treatment upgrades, low-energy lighting and tighter waste segregation has driven a double-digit reduction in carbon emissions, with solar and wind generation now under exploration. Pilgrim’s is going further at one of its farms, pairing solar and battery storage with ground-source heat and heat exchangers in pursuit of self-generated power.
And over in the drinks aisle, Suntory’s redesign of its Lucozade Energy packaging cut plastic use and reduced water consumption in production at the same time, a reminder that resource efficiency and product decisions are increasingly the same conversation.
Why this is a competitive issue, not just a green one
What unites these examples is that the environmental benefit and the commercial benefit point in precisely the same direction. Lower energy usage intensity means lower unit costs and healthier margins. Better visibility of energy use means more resilient operations, less exposure to price spikes and fewer nasty surprises when a chiller begins to fail. And a credible, data-backed sustainability story is fast becoming a condition of doing business.
The major grocers are tightening supplier requirements: Tesco, for example, has asked its suppliers since 2021 to report their manufacturing and agricultural emissions annually and to set science-based reduction targets aligned with its own net-zero ambitions. “Trust us,” no longer satisfies buyers or the regulator.
There’s a competitive edge here, too. While some ageing production plants close or relocate, those investing in efficiency are positioning themselves as suppliers of choice and, often, as the last site standing in their category. In a sector where margins are thin and energy is one of the largest controllable costs, a few percentage points off the energy bill can be the difference between winning and losing a contract.
Where to start
For manufacturers wondering where to begin, the sequence matters more than the size of the budget. Start by getting genuine production-line or machine-level visibility of energy, water and heat; you cannot optimise what you cannot see. From there, the order is what counts. The first priority is to identify how to use less: less gas, electricity and water through quick behavioural and scheduling changes that cost little and build the internal buy-in bigger projects depend on.
Next, redesign the energy-hungry processes themselves. Only then does it pay to layer on the larger capital schemes – heat pumps, heat-recovery systems, on-site generation and, later still, to switch the remaining demand to greener sources, where the numbers genuinely stack up. Crucially, fold energy usage insights into day-to-day operational decisions rather than parking them in an annual report.
Sustainability on the factory floor was never really a choice between cost and conscience. Framed properly as a question of efficiency, resilience and competitiveness it is one of the few initiatives that genuinely pays for itself while doing the right thing. For grocery manufacturers facing volatile energy markets and rising expectations, the question is no longer whether they can afford to act, but whether they can afford not to.
Simon Clark is an award-winning mechanical engineer, founder of Julius & Clark, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering. He advises manufacturers and supply-chain businesses on operational transformation, productivity and practical technology adoption. His experience includes work with organisations such as Unilever, British Sugar, Mondelez, P&G and AB-InBev.
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