From Farm to Fork: Long-Term Cost Savings Across the Supply Chain

It seems like the food and beverage sector has been hit by the perfect storm. The headlines show that rising food costs are leading the way for higher inflation rates, but the industry has been feeling the frustration long before consumers.

Factors such as rising energy costs have been a strain on all stages of the supply chain for many years now. Extreme weather and conflicts have also reduced the availability of raw materials and caused long-term cost rises that pass through the supply chain. When these variables are significant and unaddressable at an industry level, it’s tough to decide where to focus your energy.

So where can you make a dent in your costs across the supply chain? We’ll look into ways that technology is streamlining processes and delivering sustained cost cuts.

Cost-Saving Ideas for Each Stage – From Factory to Fork

Farming & Raw Material Production

·     Intelligent farming: Advanced soil sensor technology and weather monitors offer greater visibility into ground and air conditions, preventing overuse of fertilisers and water in farming operations.

·     Greenhouses: In enclosed growing and storage spaces, smart monitoring for temperature, humidity and other parameters helps to verify your environmental conditions and optimise HVAC usage.

·     Asset monitoring: The use of energy meters for machinery offers deeper insight into their condition, helping you spot inefficiencies sooner for predictive maintenance.

Manufacturing & Processing

·     Critical environments: At every stage of production, smart monitoring ensures you’re maintaining the right conditions in real time, without cooling a specific area more than required.

·     Asset intelligence: The long-term strain on machinery can go unseen, but smart metering helps to identify spikes in energy use and action predictive maintenance.

·     Production schedules: If you’re not already aligning peak production times with off-peak energy costs, then it’s worth reviewing your energy contract and energy usage patterns to find the perfect balance.

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Greggs Automated Compliance Processes and Cut EnergyCosts

The implementation of remote temperature and energy monitoring at manufacturing sites helped Greggs with compliance processes and identifying cost savings. The results were clear:

·     Automated reporting to support BRC compliance and reduced risk of human error from manual checks

·     Sustained energy savings across all utilities, saving 5% per year

·     Proactive asset maintenance, enabling further cost-savings

·     Minimising stock loss and reducing carbon emissions in the process

You can read the full story here.

Cold Chain & Storage

·     Human behaviour: Smart monitoring for chillers and freezers can shed light on temperature fluctuations due to staff processes, impacting food safety and energy costs.

·     Environments: In large warehouse and storage spaces, you can track environmental conditions in the right places with carefully mapped sensors to optimise your HVAC systems

·     Transport environments: From one location to the next, ensuring full traceability of your product conditions during transit helps to avoid spoiling from variable ambient temperatures

Retail & Food to Go

·     Display storage: With real-time monitoring and trend-analysis, you can evaluate the impact of customer behaviour on chiller and freezer temperatures to improve energy efficiency

·     Prep conditions: Temperature monitoring can also help you analyse your food preparation spaces to ensure food safety compliance and ambient temperature control

·     Smart packaging: Sensor technology is now being leveraged at a micro level with smart packaging, helping you to efficiently maintain storage temperatures

The full return-on-investment

Implementing technology to automate or optimise processes is often viewed as a risk when there aren’t short-term cost-savings. It’s important to evaluate the true return-on-investment and how it extends beyond the first-hand financial benefits for your business. For example, energy metering for key machinery may uncover cost-savings on day one, whereas environment monitoring for storage areas could show you different ways to manage HVAC systems for different times of the year.

When used appropriately, technology provides your business with greater intelligence for your operations and delivers actionable insights.Ideally, it should go as far as building operational resilience, improving consistency and accuracy in areas such as food safety compliance. Make sure to evaluate the full benefits of any cost-saving measures.

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