Saving Two Fully Laden Jumbo Jets Worth of Material at Greencore

Three case studies were put together by S A Partners and Keivan Zokaei at the Greencore Food to Go Manton Wood factory in the UK, which is the world’s largest and most sophisticated sandwich manufacturing facility. They produced more than three million sandwiches every week for supermarkets, convenience stores, garage forecourts and coffee shop chains.

The intervention team began by looking at waste at a very high level through the creation of a mass balance (or system boundary map) of all inputs and outputs, and explored the key hotspots (the points at which most physical wastes accrue) along the end to end process by populating a big picture map (or a green impact matrix). A series of improvement projects were developed as a result.

The changes are projected to save nearly 950 tonnes of waste in annualised terms. This is the equivalent of 5 million (190g) sandwiches, 680 mini cooper cars, 24 fully loaded 40-tonne lorries, or, 2 fully laden jumbo jets. A daily waste removal meeting has been implemented to ensure that the gains are sustained and that new opportunities for improvement are exploited.

Download the case studies at https://web.archive.org/web/20140929100307/http://www.sapartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Greencore.pdf