What's Cooking? Deeside UK Ltd

Industry: Food manufacturing

Service: Energy and sustainability advice

Result: What’s Cooking? has benefitted from a variety of cost and energy saving initiatives identified by IEC’s energy experts

About What’s Cooking

What’s Cooking? is a European fresh food group specialising in savoury products. Headquartered in Belgium with manufacturing sites across Europe, including our site in Deeside Northeast Wales, UK.

Built on 75 years of international food heritage, What’s Cooking? has gained a great reputation for its products. Its frozen food lines are sold to retail customers, pubs, restaurants and fast-food chains, including well-known high street brands, with offerings such as pastas, lasagnes, pizzas, sauces and soups.      

As a business, What’s Cooking? places a great deal of importance on its values. These include the love and care they put into their work, with the emphasis on quality, as well as the wellbeing and safety of their colleagues and consumers. The company prides itself on creating a positive work environment and allowing everyone to be creative and confident about trying new things. It acknowledges that big changes don’t happen overnight, but that change is important. With that in mind, What’s Cooking? has always been very aware of its environmental and sustainability obligations, which is why it engaged with Innovative Energy Consultancy Ltd (IEC).    

What’s Cooking? has 450 employees at its Deeside location, manufacturing over 1,000 tonnes of food products a month, or approximately one million units a week. Energy usage is obviously high for such a large operation, with aspects such as the premises’ spiral freezers and an industrial steam boiler being considerable.

The Project Brief

What’s Cooking? was experiencing rising energy consumption and costs, creating financial pressure and increasing risk of potential penalties for failing energy performance targets under the Climate Change Agreement (CCA). Therefore, the company identified a need to develop a wider culture of energy awareness and implementation of efficiency projects.

IEC was tasked with supporting the company through a programme of energy monitoring and targeting, and creation of a site Energy Team to encourage employee engagement on driving energy efficiency to reduce emissions, consumption and cost.

 

The Solution

IEC has further developed the culture of energy awareness within the organisation, which includes regular on-site meetings, delivering presentations on current water, gas and electricity usage, performance and costs. Gavin Jones from IEC collaborates with a multi-disciplinary team from all areas of the business, to discuss ways of improving energy efficiency, reducing waste and advice on energy matters, providing an energy-focussed overview of the business. Gavin helps to drive this by holding people in the wider team to account and promoting sustainability. He also helps to prepare presentations for the What’s Cooking Group’s Quarterly Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) meeting, to highlight the site’s energy performance achievements. As the IEC team has expertise in the UK energy landscape and markets, advice for budgeting energy costs and upcoming UK energy legislative deadlines is also provided.

There have been some excellent ‘wins’ and innovative ideas that have been developed through these meetings. A few great examples of these include What’s Cooking? becoming an early adopter of LED lighting, with over 90% of its premises lit by efficient lighting, increasing the site’s steam system efficiency through improved boiler management, plus the introduction of sub-metering. IEC analyses how each utility is consumed across the site, identifying areas of high usage, studies potential trends and issues, and suggests solutions or maintenance, upgrades and repairs to improve performance.

“Sustainability and the environment are priorities for us, with a responsible attitude towards the planet and its inhabitants. As manufacturers with a large premises, our energy consumption and costs are high. Our relationship with IEC came about with the introduction of energy-related regulation – firstly the Climate Change Agreements (CCA), then Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) and Streamlined Energy & Carbon Reporting (SECR). We have had to comply with each new legislation requirement, which included meeting CCA targets, to achieve a maximum rebate.

“One of the biggest benefits of working with IEC is that the company has an awareness and best practice experience from other industries, as well as the wider food manufacturing industry. Gavin is our ‘go-to guy’ and we have a strong and trusted relationship with IEC. Energy is a niche area of expertise, and we find IEC great to work with, always easily reachable at the end of the phone and very knowledgeable.”

David Rimington, Plant Manager at What’s Cooking Deeside UK Ltd