HJ Heinz European Frozen and Chilled Foods invested $9 MM to establish a strategic headquarters in Dublin and expand its frozen ready-meals production facility.
Project Highlights
Dennis Group provided facility and process design-build services for the expansion of an Heinz’s existing facility located in Dundalk, Ireland. The facility design included renovation of 5,000 m2 of internal production space and the construction of 3,000 m2 of new food manufacturing and utility areas.
This project involved the installation of two high-speed fully automated frozen-ready meal production lines.
A state of the art sauce manufacturing system utilizing vacuum cooling and a flexible batch management and control system supported the production lines.
Additional process equipment included pasta blanching, high shear slurry blending, and potato and fish handling.
Installation of completely new utility systems and a wastewater treatment plant was also incorporated into the project.
In order to comply with new Massachusetts regulations preventing the disposal of food waste in landfills, Ahold sought a way to beneficially reuse unsalable organic material from their grocery stores throughout the New England region, resulting in the development of an anaerobic digester.
Project Highlights
Dennis Group designed and built a Product Recovery Operation (PRO) at Ahold’s distribution center. The PRO facility consists of equipment capable of processing 130 tons of food waste daily, converting the waste into feedstock for a 1.3 MM gallon anaerobic digester.
Biogas produced for the anaerobic digestion process powers a 1.1 MW generator, providing renewable energy to power the distribution center.
The facility reduces Ahold’s food waste to landfill by 25,000 tons annually.
The PRO plan produces 30% of the distribution center’s electricity.
Dennis Group was able to secure $1.3 MM in energy efficiency rebates and grants for the project.
Shortly after the merger between Nestlé and Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the decision was made to consolidate manufacturing and distribution functions at the Operations Center located in Bakersfield, CA.
Project Highlights
This expansion consisted of adding over 320,000 square feet of processing, utility, warehouse/distribution, and R&D space, including six new production lines.
In addition to three conventional ice cream mix production tanks, the facility includes a yogurt production room. This space is pressurized to preclude infiltration of airborne contaminants. 3000 gallon batches of cream are inoculated with live yogurt cultures to produce the base yogurt mix. The mix is batch pasteurized, then pumped to surge tanks for addition of flavors, prior to freezing, hardening and packaging.
Once the expansion was completed, in fewer than 12 months from groundbreaking to saleable product, Dreyer’s manufacturing throughput was doubled.
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