Frito-Lay bets on future energy cuts

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retrofit of the Casa Grande factory, scheduled to be completed by 2010, would reduce electricity and water consumption by 90% and its natural gas use by 80%. Greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 50-75%, the company said.

Frito-Lay hopes the project will help the company save money on energy costs, particularly as oil prices approach $100 a barrel. What works in Casa Grande, one of 37 plants it operates in the United States and Canada, would then be replicated at other sites where possible.

The Casa Grande plant was built in 1984 and is bigger than two football fields. With its peelers and ovens and fryers, the plant burns enough natural gas in a year to heat 13,000 homes for the winter, and it makes 212 million bags of snack chips a year.

Under a directive from Frito-Lay to cut utility costs, the managers at the Casa Grande plant have already installed skylights in conference rooms, offices and its finished goods warehouse to reduce the need for artificial light. They have also bought more-fuel-efficient ovens and have begun recapturing heat from its oven stacks.

Vacuum hoses were installed to pull moisture from potato slices, both to recapture the water and to reduce the amount of heat needed to cook the potato chips.

Since 1999, Frito-Lay company-wide has reduced its water use by 38%, natural gas by 27% and electricity by 21%, cutting $55 million a year in utility costs.

But finding new ways to save energy and water is getting harder each year. So Frito-Lay officials started exploring more ambitious—and expensive—methods.

At a strategy meeting last year with Nooyi, Frito-Lay managers proposed creating a plant with a combination of technologies that would cut water and energy use as much as possible.

“We said, ‘This might not make a hell of a lot of sense initially, but long-term this is where we need to go’,” said David Haft, Frito-Lay’s group vice-president for sustainability and productivity.