Energy Savings For Kraft

Challenge

Like their counterparts in agri-food plants around the world, the operations team at the Kraft Foods coffee plant in Banbury, U.K., faced rising utility costs. Their challenge to Cargill: identify economically feasible projects that could be implemented to cut energy consumption by five to 15 percent. An important secondary goal: identify capacity improvements to increase production efficiencies.

Approach

Working closely with Kraft technical and operations experts, the Cargill team developed a computer model of the instant coffee process, using Cargill' s proprietary agri-food library of models. Once the Kraft-Cargill team validated that the model provided a good representation of the process, it was used to simulate the impact of a wide range of potential process modifications.

Results

After the 11-week project, the Kraft engineering team was able to present recommendations for economically feasible project opportunities that would, if implemented, exceed the energy reduction goal. They also presented opportunities for production capacity improvements that had been identified.