ENERGY STAR Focus on Energy Efficiency in Food Processing

What is the Food Processing Focus?

The Focus is a partnership between US EPA’s ENERGY STAR program and food processing companies to improve energy efficiency.

How does the Focus improve energy efficiency?

EPA helps food processors overcome barriers to using energy efficiently and provides energy management resources unique to this industry. In all cases, strategic corporate energy management is promoted as the basis for achieving long-term, sustained energy savings.

Who may participate?

Any food processor with plants in the U.S may participate.

Energy management tools and resources

EPA’s ENERGY STAR Food Processing Focus has tools and resources to help you improve energy efficiency, save money, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Score the energy performance of your food processing plant.

Use EPA’s food processing plant energy performance indicators (EPI's) to assess how efficiently your plants use energy, relative to similar plants nationwide. The system’s 1–100 scale enables you to quickly understand how a plant is performing — a score of 50 indicates average energy performance, while a score of 75 or better indicates top performance. Plants receiving an EPI score of 75 or higher are eligible to earn nationally recognized ENERGY STAR certification. If your plant scores 75 or above, learn how you can apply for the ENERGY STAR.

EPA offers EPI's for scoring the energy performance of food processing plants.

• Download the Juice Processing Plant EPI
• Download the Frozen Fried Potato Plant EPI
• Download the Cookie and Cracker Baking Plant EPI
• Read about the Food Processing Plant EPIs (621KB)

Special opportunity to test a new food processing EPI.

A plant energy performance indicator (EPI) for tomato product processing is currently under testing. We need help in reviewing the model before it can be finalized and offered for certification. If you are interested in providing testing assistance, please try out this model by inputting the information for each of your company's tomato product processing plant. Once the model has generated a score for each plant, please contact Gale Boyd at Duke University (gale.boyd@duke.edu) to discuss the model's performance.

• Download the Draft Tomato Product Processing Plant EPI

Improve the energy efficiency of your food processing plant.

EPA’s energy guide, Energy Efficiency Improvement and Cost Saving Opportunities for the Fruit and Vegetable Processing Industry discusses energy efficiency practices and technologies that can be implemented right now in your food processing plants.

• Download the Energy Guide (1.1MB)

EPA's energy guide, Energy Efficiency Improvement and Cost Saving Opportunities for the Baking Industry discusses energy efficiency practices and technologies that can be implemented right now in your baking plants.

• Download the Energy Guide (977KB)

Develop a corporate energy strategy.

Energy Strategy for the Road Ahead is a groundbreaking report that guides companies through the process of evaluating future energy risks and enables them to set a robust energy strategy for the future.

Build a corporate energy management program.

EPA’s ENERGY STAR Guidelines for Energy Management outline the steps for creating a corporate energy management program.

Assess your energy management program.

EPA’s Energy Management Assessment Matrix is a quick and easy way to compare your corporate energy practices to those outlined in the Guidelines for Energy Management and help you identify areas for improvement.

Network and learn from food processing energy managers.

Energy managers from food processing companies participating in the ENERGY STAR focus meet annually to network among themselves and learn together about the challenges confronting energy management in their businesses and identify solutions.