Avara Foods is one of the UK’s largest food businesses, supplying chicken, turkey, and duck to well-known supermarkets and restaurants. Avara processes 4.5 million poultry every week, across nine sites. The company uses BS EN ISO 50001 Energy Management Systems, as part of their larger sustainability agenda, encompassing ethics, bird welfare, health and safety, people, and the environment.
The BS EN ISO 50001 standard is a good framework to help implement an Energy Management System. It provides good practice guidance on how to reduce unnecessary energy usage, usually resulting in a greener, more sustainable business operation, with the added benefit of significant cost savings.
Since starting to use BS EN ISO 50001 in 2014, Avara has seen gains across the business in operational efficiency, cost savings, and reputational benefits.
The company reduced its energy usage through:
- Buying the right kit – as part of the procurement process, Avara has installed four combined heat and power plants (three running on poultry litter, one on wood pellets) and 12 biomass boilers which run on wood chip/pellets
- Process review – to drive a reduction in energy consumption
- Setting goals – for usage reduction
- Leadership – energy action plans are approved by the Executive Team
- Energy champions – who look for opportunities to drive energy efficiency
- Team training
The management team has been able to embed a standardized energy management system to drive efficiency in their manufacturing process. Using Energy Management Systems, Avara has achieved consistent reductions in energy consumption each year in electricity, natural gas, LPG, and diesel. This is a saving of more than 1000 megawatt-hours of grid electricity consumption, equivalent to the total annual electricity consumption of 238 UK households. By the end of 2019, Avara also reduced 254,763kg CO2e (the equivalent of planting 4,213 tree seedlings, with their carbon benefit of growth for 10 years, or 86.7 tons of waste recycled instead of landfilled).
They’ve driven energy efficiency throughout the entire business, helping employees to understand the importance of saving energy. BS EN ISO 50001 has helped them make a significant contribution to environmental and climate protection while reducing carbon emissions and enabled them to look at energy use in the round. Avara now has plans for further decarbonization of its operations using the design element of BS EN ISO 50001.
The Energy Compliance and Sustainability Manager for Avara said: “I’m really passionate about the scale and the impact that BS EN ISO 50001 can have. Other manufacturers should not see it as red tape or bureaucracy, but as a win-win situation that really drives continual improvement. If everyone, across all sectors, achieved the carbon savings that we have, the UK could achieve net-zero.”
Top tips on making energy management effective for you from other businesses
We spoke to several business leaders about what drives real improvement in relation to their energy management system, and what made use of their BS EN ISO 50001 certification with BSI so successful.
“Executive support was vital, enabling the financial backing to pay for training costs of implementation.”
Tony Waters, Managing Director, Solo Cup Europe.
"Energy savings require the commitment of…the whole workforce. There ideally needs to be a champion in the organization who can drive change and savings."
Brian Haslam, Quality, Environmental and Energy Manager, Camfill Farr.
“Everyone involved in energy should attend; from energy purchase, utility operation and generation to plant operations and maintenance."
Mike Thornhill, Managing Director, Thornhill Heat Exchangers.
“A lot of people were doing the right things anyway, but the training gave them greater insight and information.”
Tony Waters, Managing Director, Solo Cup Europe.
"It is really important to make our energy-saving results meaningful to our customers.”
Sophie Hutchinson, Sustainability Manager, Morgan Lovell.
“I can carry out external audits in quality and food safety at our suppliers’ premises, and that drives great improvements to our business as a result.”
Denise Graham, Technical Manager, Tata Global Beverages.
BSI
May 2020
