Shearer’s Foods’ plant is first manufacturing plant in the world to earn LEED Platinum
Shearer’s Foods


Background

Shearer’s Foods is an award-winning snack food manufacturer with facilities in five U.S. states as well as Canada. It was founded in 1974 by the Shearer family and has been committed to sustainable manufacturing practices.

To lead by example in the food manufacturing industry, Shearer’s opened a state-of-the-art potato chip manufacturing facility in Massillon, Ohio, using innovative energy efficiency strategies.


Approach

Shearer’s Foods asked World Energy Innovations to develop energy models and design and implement systems to improve energy efficiency for each step of the manufacturing process at its Massillon plant.

World Energy Innovations’ energy audit built the foundation for the new energy model because it provided detailed information about the thermal mass balance involved in the cooking, baking and frying processes at the plant. It measured the BTUs used per pound of product produced, establishing a baseline for comparison for the new systems’ development.

As part of this partnership, World Energy Innovations:

  • Developed new waste heat recovery strategies to capture rejection heat from the chip manufacturing processes and reduce the need for purchased energy
  • Assisted Shearer’s in completing documentation required for United States Green Building Council LEED certification
  • Provided additional innovative energy efficiency strategies for a 60,000-square-foot addition to the Massillon plant
  • Assisted with retrofitting and automating the energy systems at Shearer’s Brewster, Ohio plant

Results

As a result of its work with World Energy Innovations, Shearer’s Massillon facility was the first food manufacturing plant in the world to earn LEED Platinum certification.

Its transformative energy systems have resulted in the facility using 30 percent less energy per pound of product manufactured. The new operating cost of the total facility, including core manufacturing processes and HVAC, achieves a 30 percent savings in metered BTUs.

And more than 90 percent of the plant’s heat generated by cooking is repurposed to heat the building in the winter.


“I wholeheartedly recommend World Energy Innovations to food manufacturers looking to enhance productivity and environmental sustainability while reducing energy costs.

The detailed WEI analysis aims to understand the total thermodynamic picture of a facility’s operations, down to identifying the baseline of BTUs per pound of product for each product line. After making process loads as efficient as possible, WEI engineers look at opportunities to recover heat from manufacturing processes for applications such as facility heating.

They continue to support our LEED Platinum plant in Massillon, Ohio, with Monitoring and Verification services to help make sure our systems are optimized every day for maximum performance.”

–Scott Weyant, Director of Facilities, Shearer’s Foods