Meat + Poultry - September 2008 - 50

Sustainable growth
Processors take a green approach to plant
construction and renovation projects
By Bernard Shire
meatpoultry@sosland.com

W

hile meat and poultry companies frequently consider
how they can grow and expand their businesses by either building
new plants, adding on to existing ones
or modernizing and updating their existing facilities by retroﬁtting them, operators also consider how their plants'
environmental impact as they strive to
make production conditions more efﬁcient and sanitary in and around their
buildings. That's according to executives
at a number of engineering, design and
build ﬁrms that are involved in new
construction or renovation of meat- and
poultry-processing companies.
Often they do this by factoring
"green" practices into their expansion
plans. And by doing so, they are able to
save energy, improve lighting and ventilation and cut water use, which can cost
companies a lot of extra money.
Darryl Wernimont, director of The
Haskell Company, a design-build ﬁrm
in Jacksonville, Fla. that does construction and renovation with plants in the
meat and poultry industry, points to
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September 2008

three major trends he is seeing in new
construction, renovation and retroﬁtting
in the industry - sustainable design and
building construction; a continued emphasis on food safety and sanitation as
it applies to the design and operation
of plant facilities, and plant designs that
address employee diversity and inclusion in plant operations.
"The number-one trend that is dominant right now and growing in the meat
and poultry industry is 'green,' sustainable and LEED design and construction,"
says Wernimont. "LEED - the Leadership
in Energy and Environmental Design - is
a program established by the U.S. Green
Building Council, and is the most widely accepted system in the United States
for judging and recognizing sustainable
building projects. Many of our clients,
including meat and poultry plants, are
LEED-certiﬁed," he says. "Seven years
ago, only one in 50 clients would be
knowledgeable or even interested in
LEED. During this past year, 80 percent
to 90 percent of the clients I spoke to
felt sustainable initiatives needed to be
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a part of their new construction and existing building initiatives."
As for food safety, Wernimont points
to initiatives like the American Meat Institute's 10 Principles for Sanitary Design
of Equipment and 11 Principles for Sanitary Design of Facilities. Last year, his
company designed the ﬁrst ready-to-eat
food plant constructed in accordance
with the AMI principles - the Land O'
Frost deli meat-processing facility in
Madisonville, Ky. And in order to encourage and achieve employee diversity
and inclusion, Wernimont says one goal
of his design teams is to enable people
of different abilities to demonstrate their
capabilities by eliminating or reducing
physical barriers across the facility. "This
goal will garner even more attention in
the future," he says.
While there were tens of millions
invested by processors in 2007, plant
construction and renovation activity in
2008 has been off slightly, due to the
Above: New Land O' Frost ready-to-eat food
plant, Madisonville, Ky., completed in 2007.
(Photo courtesy of the Haskell Company)
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Meat + Poultry - September 2008

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