Innovation From the Ground Up

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / December 15, 2023 / Hormel Foods Corporation

Water and energy savings innovations earned Fontanini Foods the Green Plant of the Year award.

Talk about a win-win-win.

A Hormel Foods plant just outside Chicago that makes premium Italian meatballs, sausages and pizza toppings has found a way to save water, reduce energy use and transform byproducts into biodiesel.

The company's Fontanini Foods plant in McCook, Ill., has 60-foot-long ovens that "use a lot of cooling water to prevent overheating," said Michael Wysocki, the plant's engineering manager. The water also evenly distributes the heat load.

Until a couple of years ago, when this water got too hot (about 180 degrees), it would go down the drain. "So we found an opportunity to install some water recovery tanks, pumps and controls, and we're reusing this water," Wysocki said. "We capture it."

According to Wysocki, the hot water is pumped to two large boilers that supply steam for the plant's processes. This saves water and captures "free heat" so the boilers don't need to use as much natural gas to turn water into steam. The modifications were so groundbreaking, "the oven manufacturer had never heard of it before," Wysocki said. "We thought that was pretty cool."

Innovation Leads to Award

Hormel Foods purchased the Fontanini plant from its family founders in 2017. The inventive strategies to save energy and water led Fontanini Foods to garner the 2023 Green Plant of the Year award from Food Processing magazine. Hormel Foods is the first two-time winner of this prestigious award.

Andrew Sieren, Fontanini plant manager, said that from their first day on the job, team members are encouraged to "look for waste in the process" and search for opportunities to reduce it. "It's in our DNA."

The Hormel Foods Sustainability Best of the Best competition, held each year, recognizes team members' best practices. "It's highly competitive," Sieren said. "And teams enjoy bringing forth what they're working on. It gets the competitive juices flowing, and it is a big deal at the plant to win that award."

Among the innovations that earned the Fontanini facility Green Plant of the Year is a reverse osmosis system that removes impurities, such as calcium and magnesium, from the plant's water supply.

"Just like that stuff can clog up your coffeemaker at home, it does the same thing in plant equipment," Wysocki said. "As you use more water, you have to find a way to eliminate that buildup."

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