How food and drink manufacturers can keep the lights (and lines) on

It’s 3:00 AM on a Tuesday and your production line is humming – mixers spinning, chillers working hard to maintain the cold chain. Suddenly, a brief voltage dip flickers across the plant. It’s barely perceptible, but it’s enough to stall a critical drive. In seconds, batches are at risk as processes fall out of sync.  

Sound familiar? For many food and drink manufacturers, even a momentary power blip can snowball into costly downtime. These facilities run on a knife-edge of uptime: refrigeration, pasteurisation, high-speed packaging and other energy-intensive processes cannot simply pause without consequences. Every minute of lost production or spoiled product cuts into already thin margins. 

That’s why improving energy resilience is as critical as reducing energy cost or carbon emissions. A robust resilience plan ensures the plant can ride through grid disturbances or outages so that energy never  becomes a bottleneck to production.  

A resilience framework for food and drink manufacturers 

The best approach is layered to significantly reduce the risk of unplanned stoppages: 

• Prevent problems at the source: Maintain power quality and stability within your facility. This means balancing phase loads, installing power conditioning equipment, and optimising control systems to avoid self-inflicted spikes or drops.
• Absorb grid glitches with fast-acting backup power. Batteries can act as the plant’s “shock absorber,” smoothing out voltage dips and bridging gaps of a few seconds or minutes. In practice, an industrial battery or UPS can instantaneously supply power if the grid momentarily fails. But even a relatively small battery can provide ride-through energy for short outages, covering the gap until either grid power returns or backup generators start.
• Sustain operations during prolonged outages or grid constraints by having on-site generation ready to go. Backup generators with automatic transfer switches are a traditional solution to cover extended losses of power. They should be sized to support your critical loads – those processes and systems that absolutely must not fail. Increasingly, manufacturers are also looking at onsite generation that serves a dual purpose of everyday efficiency and backup. For example, Combined Heat and Power (CHP) can run in parallel with the grid for efficiency, but also can be configured to run in island mode if the grid goes down. This adds a layer of resilience alongside delivering day-to-day cost savings.  

The result? Fewer unplanned stoppages, cleaner restarts and confidence that energy won’t be the reason a batch is lost. 

Implementation of your resilience framework 

Begin by mapping out which equipment is essential, such as equipment that safeguards food safety. This means you can prioritise what needs protection, and potentially allow less critical loads to shed during an incident. 

Run a resilience audit of your production site. Identify single points of failure and quantify the cost of a worst-case outage (in lost product, downtime, reputational damage on missed orders, etc.). This will justify investments in backup systems. Implement power monitoring to catch quality issues and consider power conditioning equipment (voltage regulators, harmonic filters).  

Next, ensure you have standby generation or a plan for longer outages: test your backup generator monthly (many failures occur from neglected maintenance).  

Then, explore a comprehensive on-site microgrid to insulate your operations. Centrica Business Solutions can assist by designing an integrated resilience solution – from critical load mapping to installing battery storage and generators with active controls that kick in when they’re needed. 

With these layers in place, food manufacturers can keep production running through grid events and ensure energy issues never disrupt business. In an industry where on-time delivery and constant output are paramount, this peace of mind is priceless.