General Mills Meets Energy Efficiency Goal Four Years Ahead of Plan
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that General Mills achieved its goal to improve its energy efficiency in its plants four years ahead of its plan. In 2012, General Mills set a 10-year goal to improve energy efficiency in the company’s 26 largest U.S.-based plants by 20% and this year already above the goal: 20.4%.
“Since 2010, General Mills Engineering has focused a small corporate team specifically on driving energy efficiency improvements to drive cost savings and positively impact our environmental footprint. This team has worked with the utilities leaders in our plants, along with external experts, to develop best practice operational and maintenance standards which are implemented, optimized and spread to other sites,” Daren Kaiser, global energy strategy leader, said for WorldBakers.com.
The initial investments were in metering and data visualization to identify the magnitude of usage, trends, and losses, the specialist from General Mills explained. “This was common to most sites and represented small amounts of capital, but enabled numerous operational best practices to be implemented,” Kaiser added. Next, energy efficient technologies such as high performance compressed air dryers, boiler economizers, advanced HVAC controls, lighting, and dryer dew point controls were installed where a three-year or better economic payback could be achieved. Finally, there were a few large capital projects that were unique to certain locations such as a biogas generator at one of the Yoplait facilities.
“Holistically, we continuously work to improve a zero-loss culture in everything that we do. With respect to energy and water, this means that we are working to eliminate waste or usage that is not specifically needed to process our products at optimum levels of quality. Every bit of excess utilities use that we can eliminate or recycle not only directly saves money, but it creates a positive impact on the environment,” Kaiser stressed.
According to a press release, the company’s 20% improvement represents a total of over 2 million MMBTU’s of energy (combined electricity and natural gas) over the six years. In fiscal 2018, more than 60 energy efficiency and reduction projects were completed across the company. These improvement projects saved over 12 million kWh, delivered USD4.8m in cost savings and avoided nearly 6,000 metric tons of CO2e of GHG emissions.
“We are honored to be recognized by the DOE for our progress to improve our efficiency and reduce our energy consumption. We started this journey by looking within our walls back in 2005 and since then have extended our commitments and work across our entire value chain. We have to own the entirety of our impact, and this is one of the many ways General Mills is working to reduce our impact on the environment,” said John Church, chief supply chain officer and global business solutions officer at General Mills.
As part of the company’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reduction goal, each General Mills production facility has a target to reduce energy use by 2% annually, normalized to production. During fiscal 2018, this rate decreased by 2% compared to the prior year; absolute energy use decreased by 7%.
General Mills is listed on the 2018 Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and the 2018 CDP Climate a List and Newsweek Green Rankings.