Amy's Kitchen – Susan Dougherty – 2017

Goals 

The team at Amy’s Kitchen, a family-owned company and leader in the organic vegetarian food industry, is committed to ensuring sustainable practices in every aspect of their business. As part of the overall sustainability strategy, Amy’s Kitchen enlisted EDF Climate Corps fellow Sue Dougherty to find opportunities within the food manufacturing process to improve energy efficiency.

Solutions

Dougherty worked with the on-site teams at the food manufacturing plant to understand the current sources of inefficiencies. Based on her observations, she recommended deploying an energy management system (EMS) to collect energy data for plant equipment, providing the capability to baseline and benchmark energy use. The proposed EMS takes advantage of the plant’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software and hardware architecture to enhance data collection and analytic capabilities.

Potential Impact

The EMS will improve the visibility of energy use throughout the plant and facilitate active involvement of all personnel in energy conservation. It will provide the performance data necessary to assess plant-wide energy use and prioritize efficiency initiatives, such as equipment upgrades, added controls and automation, and operational changes. The first phase of the proposed EMS rollout would add monitoring and control equipment to the freezers, which could be utilized to save over $100,000 and 660,000 kWh/year, with a 1.2 year payback.