Food and beverage
Factory Modelling for Food and Beverage Manufacturers
Food plants run on changeovers, cleaning cycles, shelf life and a product mix that shifts every week. A spreadsheet built on averages misses most of that. We build a working model of your plant, then test each investment you are considering against it before any capital is committed.
Why food plants are hard to plan
Most simulation software is sold to automotive and logistics, where a line makes one product at a steady rate. A food plant carries dozens of SKUs on shared lines. Changeovers and cleaning take capacity that never appears in a cycle-time calculation. Shelf life limits how much buffer stock you can hold. Tanks, vessels and cooking stages tie the front of the plant to the back, so a change in one place shows up three stages later.
Those interactions decide what the plant can really produce, and they are what our models are built to capture.
What we model
- Bulk and intermediate storage. Tank levels, fill rates, hold times and cleaning cycles.
- Batch processes. Cooking, mixing, blending and fermentation, with recipe-specific batch sizes and cycle times.
- Every kind of product and WIP. Liquids, solids, concentrates and products that lose mass through evaporation, across batch, continuous and mixed production flows.
- Filling, packing and palletising. Pack formats, line speeds, changeover matrices and crewing.
- The schedule. Production sequence, shift patterns and shared crews, checked against what the plant can physically do.
Investment decisions we test
- Adding or widening a line
- Enlarging buffer storage
- Automating a section of a line
- Consolidating sites or moving products between them
- Changing shift patterns
Each scenario is compared side by side on investment cost, payback, throughput, waste and labour. AI-assisted scenario tools work through thousands of options to find the changes that give the most throughput for the least investment.
Results from food and drink projects
- Ration pack assembly: £4M of cost removed from the design of a new facility before it was approved, compared with the spreadsheet-based plan.
- Pickles and condiments: moved from 24/7 to 24/5 operation, with 20% less total changeover time, 40% less intermediate tank capacity and 15% lower energy use.
- Vinegar: 15% more throughput from AI-optimised scheduling across milling, fermentation and bottling, with tank utilisation raised to 87%.
- Chocolate moulding: 7% less waste from better sized buffer storage, and a tested case for widening the moulding line to support 20% more output.
- Biscuits: a £3M Lean redesign with more automation, tested in the model before the money was committed.
When modelling is worth it
Modelling earns its cost when a decision is expensive and hard to reverse. In food manufacturing that usually means one of these:
- a new line, a new facility or an automation project
- consolidating sites or moving production between them
- a product range that has grown until changeovers eat into the week
- a capacity figure promised to a customer or the board that nobody can yet prove