Baking & Snack - July 2010 - 72

ENERGY MANAGEMENT

Seeing Green
King's Hawaiian developed its Green
Vision program that reduced the
amount of resin used to produce
plastic bags by a minimum of 122,000
lb each year. The Torrance, CA-based
company also recycles a ton of corrugated cardboard material each day.
That same cardboard is then recycled
into 100% post-consumer waste
shipping materials.
Additionally, King's Hawaiian developed an educational program on
its Website to teach consumers how
to recycle and reuse its packaging.
Such efforts, albeit small, are being
recognized by the government. Last
year, California awarded King's Hawaiian a Governor's Environmental
and Economic Leadership Award.
Consumers also have a higher
awareness of green initiatives. The
International Food Information Council's 2010 "Consumer Perceptions of
Food Technology Survey" indicated
that 50% of consumers have heard
or read at least a "little" about the
concept of sustainability in food production. That's up from 41% in 2008
and 30% in 2007.

◀ ▼ King's Hawaiian
teaches consumers how
to recycle its packaging
as a part of its Green
Vision program.
KING'S HAWAIIAN

BAKING & SNACK / July 2010

"We're always hitting the gold
standard on our product as far as
product quality," he noted. "There
are certain things you can do on paper, others you can model, and then
there are a lot of unexpected variables that you don't really see until
something is in full production."
UNPREDICTABLE PAYBACKS.
On the tortilla chip line, the unexpected variables included predicting the manufacturing moisture
content of the masa dough for
chips. Shearer's cooks, soaks and
grinds corn in-house to make masa,
but as with most commodities, producing consistent, high-quality tortilla chips with a new crop is anything but a science.
This year, because the corn crops
were harvested early due to weather
conditions, moisture was adjusted
to bring the masa within processing specifications. That process,
Mr. Weyandt said, resulted in some
damage to the corn's cellular structure. The new oven, he added, can
adjust more easily to different fac-

▲ After firing up production of tortilla chips in April,
Shearer's Foods' new Massillon, OH, operation has
reduced total energy usage by more than 30%.
SAFREED'S PHOTOGRAPHY

tors to provide additional quality
assurance to the process.
"Given the nature of the oven and
how it was designed with the infrared
burners, it is so much more flexible,"
Mr. Weyandt said. "It has allowed us
to make the best of a lot of things that
we couldn't have planned for."
Overall, instituting a companywide sustainability program, he
added, requires an extensive, ongoing process that initially establishes
baselines that identify all sources of
energy usage and subsequent scorecarding for determining how energy
is used in each facility.
"Sustainability is a journey and
not a destination," Mr. Weyandt
noted. "We are just scratching the
surface here at Shearer's."
For some companies, starting up a sustainability program is
as simple as setting up an Excel
spreadsheet. For others, getting
started also requires partnering

Baking & Snack - July 2010

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