FOOD MANUFACTURING
The Sector
Food manufacturing is unusual in that most sites run heating and cooling at the same time. Cooking, baking, blanching, pasteurising and sterilising all demand consistent process heat, often from gas-fired boilers or ovens, while the same site is simultaneously running refrigeration and chilling to keep raw material and finished product safe.
Hygiene requirements shape everything here. Any change to plant or process has to account for food-safe materials, cleaning-in-place cycles, and allergen control, which makes food manufacturing a sector where the engineering has to fit around compliance, not the other way round.
Decarbonisation in Food Manufacturing
The simultaneous heating and cooling demand is the sector's biggest opportunity. Refrigeration and chilling systems reject heat as a by-product, heat that's usually just discarded, while elsewhere on the same site, hot water or low-grade heating is being generated using gas boilers. Recovering reject heat from refrigeration and redirecting it to hot water, pre-heating or space heating is a well-established technique in food and drink processing, and it doesn't require replacing your core production equipment.
What Gets Missed
Most food sites think about decarbonisation as "replace the boiler" and stop there. That misses the heat already being generated and thrown away on the cooling side of the same operation. The opportunity isn't always about installing something new to capture heat from a process, it's often about connecting two systems on the same site that were never designed to work together.
How We Bring the Change
We map your site's full thermal picture, where heat is being used, and where it's being rejected, before recommending anything. Because hygiene and cleaning schedules are non-negotiable, any installation is planned around your existing compliance and production calendar, not against it. Where reject heat from refrigeration can be captured and reused elsewhere on site, that's usually the fastest, lowest-disruption win available.
Talk to us about your site
info@heatcatcher.com
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