With summer heatwaves breaking records around the globe and fuel prices so high they trigger altitude sickness, one needn’t have a degree in climate science to connect the dots between resource scarcity, energy inflation, and a planetary future that, quite frankly, looks shakier by the season.

One needn’t operate an explicitly “green” snack or bakery brand, either, to appreciate that operating it so as to hedge against climate risks isn’t just a matter of virtue-signaling; it’s a matter of survival itself.

So snack and bakery brands of all hues—green or otherwise—are factoring sustainability into their production models, and their ingredient and equipment suppliers are doing the same. In the process, they’re learning that mindful manufacturing pays dividends both now and over the long term.

“That’s the great thing about sustainable business practices,” says Alysha Yinger, director of engineering, RoboVent, Sterling Heights, MI. “They’re usually good for bottom lines and the environment both. Eliminating waste, reducing energy use and cutting operational costs can—and often do—go hand-in-hand.”

Culling “energy hogs”

Yinger says this with authority, as RoboVent has long been sussing out ways to operate more sustainably, both within its own organization and for its customers. “We continually look for how we can reduce our environmental footprint by improving the efficiency of our manufacturing operations and by designing air-filtration solutions that cut energy and consumable costs for our customers,” she says.

It’s a service that energy-savvy brands will appreciate, as even in lean-and-green snack and baking facilities, the most mundane processes, practices and pieces of equipment are often the ones that gobble up the most resources—and the most sneakily, too.

For example, says Yinger, dust-collection and air-filtration systems are notorious “secret energy hogs inside food-processing facilities.” They can be so “secret,” in fact, that the same manufacturer who insists on calculating to the kilowatt how much energy their HVAC heating-and-cooling system uses may have no idea what energy toll their dust collector takes.

Moreover, says Yinger, because dust collection is necessary wherever dry ingredients are transported, conveyed, mixed, ground, milled, or processed, “an inefficient dust-collection system can add hundreds or thousands of dollars to energy costs annually.”

That’s why she advises customers to “right-size” their dust-collection and air-filtration systems for maximum effectiveness with minimal energy use, “first and foremost by making sure that dust-collection equipment is properly sized and configured for your application,” she says.

Manufacturers can also reduce airflow—or cubic feet per minute (CFM)—requirements to streamline dust collection by collecting dust as close to its source as possible and using a hood design that maximizes collection efficiency. “When we reduce the volume of air we need to move,” Yinger notes, “we also reduce the energy consumed.”

Appropriate filter selection and maintenance are critical, too. “When dust-collector filters become loaded, the system has to work harder to overcome the pressure differential,” Yinger explains. “So to reduce filter loading, use a filter-cleaning system to pulse excess dust off the filters; select filter media that allow dust to shed more easily; and change filters in a timely manner.”

Finally, to wring further energy savings from a facility, Yinger recommends choosing dust collectors with a variable-frequency drive (VFD) motor, which automatically adjusts speed to compensate for filter loading. “A VFD motor can decrease energy use by 20% to 40% over the filter’s lifecycle,” she says. “So proper system design, filter selection and maintenance go a long way toward improving air-filtration sustainability in the industry.”

Farm to factory

Rewinding the story from the plant to the R&D lab, snack and baking brands can incorporate sustainable principles into formulations by sourcing sustainable ingredients. And with suppliers bringing more transparency to their ingredients’ farm-to-factory journeys, sustainable sourcing is becoming easier for brands to do.

For example, functional-ingredient manufacturer BENEO, Parsippany, NJ, sources plant- and pulse-based crops like faba beans from Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) certified farms located close to the company’s production facilities, a company press release repots.

As the company further processes those beans into ingredients like protein concentrates and starch-rich flours, it maps out the production process to ensure lower energy consumption relative to alternative protocols, the release states. BENEO also fully uses and valorize the crops, directing the hulls and some flour toward use in sustainable pet foods, aquafeed and livestock nutrition, where they serve as fiber and vegetal-protein sources.

Finally, as pulses, even the faba beans do their part for the planet by fixing nitrogen into the soil to benefit future crops and eliminate the need for nitrogen fertilizers.                                                                                                                                    

BENEO is also lessening its ingredients’ transportation-related impacts by shifting a significant proportion of product conveyance at its European operations from roads to waterways, and increasing the unloading capacity at its Wijgmaal, Belgium, rice-starch plant.

By roughly doubling the volume of cargo transported via barge to equal nearly two thirds the company’s annual total, BENEO has halved the yearly number of truck made trips to and from its Wijgmaal plant and thereby cut carbon emissions from its rice’s port-to-factory transport by 20%, according to another company press release.

By contrast, only one third of the rice processed at the plant had arrived via barge before the changes, with the remainder travelling 199 miles to and from port by road. The increased barge transport will generate just 50 grams of carbon dioxide per ton-km relative to the 115 grams of CO₂ per ton-km associated with road transport, the release adds, further contributing to Beneo’s sustainability efforts.

Aspirations into action

So with ingredient and equipment suppliers clearing the sustainability flightpath, snack and baking brands are taking their climate-friendly efforts airborne.

Some have been doing so for a while, notes Christopher Wolfe, senior director, sustainability, Bimbo Bakeries USA (BBU), Horsham, PA. Calling the company’s sustainability actions “a thoughtful strategic commitment,” he points out that BBU “has committed to championing zero-carbon, zero-waste and regenerative agriculture initiatives across our value chain.”

It all starts on the farm, where BBU supports growers’ efforts to preserve and revitalize soil as they cultivate and harvest the raw materials that go into BBU’s products. Beyond that, Wolfe says, “We’ve implemented processes to reduce and eliminate waste throughout our value chain, and are transitioning our packaging to 100% reusable, recyclable or home-compostable by 2025.”

And in a tacit acknowledgement that sustainability comprises social as well as environmental aims, BBU donates approximately 20 million pounds of product annually to Feeding America, aiding its fight against food insecurity, according to Wolfe.

Shining stars

Another way that snack and baking brands put sustainable principles into practice is by participating in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR program.

Born in 1992 as a voluntary, market-based partnership through which EPA and participating companies work to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, ENERGY STAR attracted the involvement of the American Bakers Association (ABA), Washington, DC, when the organization signed a memorandum of understanding with EPA to promote better energy efficiency within the baking sector.

“Our goal was to collaborate and provide valuable energy-management tools to help the US baking industry achieve increased energy efficiency,” proclaims Rasma Zvaners, ABA’s vice president, regulatory and technical services, “and we’re delighted with the program’s success to date.”

Bakeries interested in participating can get involved by accepting ABA’s ENERGY STAR Challenge, Zvaners says, in which they voluntarily commit to a 10% energy-intensity reduction over five years—a timeframe, Zvaners says, that many participating bakeries handily beat.

Beyond that, she encourages interested bakeries to visit EPA’s Bakery ENERGY STAR website, where they’ll find tools for energy benchmarking, a baking-sector energy guide and information about the ENERGY STAR industry challenge and certification.

Like-minded collaboration                                   

BBU was among the bakeries to take on the challenge of becoming an ENERGY STAR partner, Wolfe says, as it saw “the value in collaborating with like-minded organizations that embrace clean-energy business practices.”

Fast-forward to now and the company is basking in the glow of receiving its fifth consecutive ENERGY START Partner of the Year title. Atop that, fully 18 Grupo Bimbo and BBU bakeries recently earned ENERGY STAR certification, which is the highest number both in the baking industry and in any industrial sector with production facilities in the US, according to an ABA press release.

This is the sixth consecutive year that multiple BBU bakeries achieved that distinction, placing BBU within the top 25% of America’s commercial bakeries in terms of energy performance. What’s more, Wolfe adds, “BBU is also a Top 100 green-power user as recognized by EPA’s Green Power Partnership.”

And EPA isn’t the only government agency encouraging snack and baking brands to operate more sustainably; the US Department of Energy also works with manufacturers through its Better Plants program to improve energy efficiency, greenhouse-gas emissions, water efficiency and waste reduction—not only greening manufacturers’ operations, but increasing their competitiveness, as well.

The program rewards plants that go the distance with its annual Better Practice Awards, presented for achievements and innovation in effective energy management. And this year, Flowers Foods, Inc., Thomasville, GA, got the nod.

According to a company press release, the bakery worked with local utility providers to leverage tiered incentives permitting better energy savings during capital projects, yielding energy-efficiency improvements that ultimately reduced Flowers’ energy use by more than 13,000 MMBtu—the equivalent of nearly 250 homes per year, per the press release.

In fact, over the course of implementing 13 efficiency projects from 2016 to 2021, the company tinkered with everything from plant boilers, compressed-air units and LED lighting upgrades to waste heat recovery, VFD exhaust-fan drives and more. “Across the Flowers network,” Margaret Ann Marsh, the company’s vice president of sustainability, states in the press release, “this program has become a case study in how to look at every operational upgrade project as an energy-efficiency opportunity.”

And that’s the right attitude going forward. Plenty of snack and bakery brands appear to share it, and as a result, they’re not only doing a world of good for their own operations; they’re doing a world of good for the world itself.