Gay Lea’s Sustainability Journey

One of Gay Lea Foods’ Environmental, Social, and Governance commitments is to reduce their carbon footprint, building toward a more sustainable future. To get things moo-ving the outstanding-in-numerous-fields farmer-owned Canadian co-operative established a baseline GHG accounting inventory. The co-operative bagged Enviro-Stewards to conduct process integration assessments at six production facilities and one distribution centre and show them the whey. The opportunities identified financial and GHG savings waiting to be milked. Collectively, these opportunities were condensed into an implementation Action Plan. The process relied on Enviro-Stewards’ Stewwi (System to Track Energy, Water and Waste Improvement) platform to track implementation status and results. Gay Lea Foods is udderly committed to taking a fondue attitude and putting carbon emissions out to pasture. Gay Lea Foods is a farmer-owned Canadian co-operative company that’s been outstanding-in-numerous-fields since 1958, with brands including Gay Lea, Salerno and Nordica. This project was a major early step on Gay Lea Foods’ sustainability journey as they looked to skim more than the top off their GHG emissions. Gay Lea wanted to identify and quantify practical and cost-effective opportunities to reduce its carbon output.

Gay Lea Foods assembled a GHG inventory of its operations to establish their carbon baseline. This was done by researching published resources and carbon emission factors, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to estimate the equivalent CO2 (CO2e) emissions of their operations based on utility consumption values, production, etc. The initial total CO2e emissions was estimated to be 99,643t CO2e a year from Scope 1, 2, 3 downstream emissions sources.

The next step was to refine the baseline utility consumption and GHG emissions by facility, which was done through detailed process integration (PI) assessments. The initial step of the PI assessments was to install metering devices on key processes to record per-minute resource consumption of water, electricity, and natural gas. Equipment specifications and operating procedures were also used to quantify process-level resource consumption. The PI assessments identified and quantified opportunities at each facility to reduce resource consumption and thereby lower the associated GHG emissions. Using this accumulated data, a pareto analysis was performed to highlight the top energy and water consumers in each facility.

Practical opportunities to reduce consumption of these top consumers were then identified and quantified. The resource and monetary savings, as well as the associated GHG reductions, were consolidated in an implementation Action Plan. Gay Lea Foods leadership used this Action Plan to prioritize which measures to implement first.

This entire process—from baseline measurements to measuring the results of implementation—is measured by Enviro-Stewards’ Stewwi (System to Track Energy, Water, and Waste Improvements) platform. Stewwi is an Energy Management Information System that provides live tracking of the status of each measure, documented gains and automated notifications of loss of gains. Stewwi allows Gay Lea Foods and Enviro-Stewards to track progress towards Gay Lea’s GHG reduction goals, providing the data necessary to support their reduction achievements.

Getting cheese wheel rolling wasn’t altogether straightforward. Being a co-operative, it takes significant coordination, collective decision-making and mutual agreement to take that first step, but Gay Lea’s leadership team was committed to making it happen. The team hired a director of corporate sustainability, Lauren Beerman, to lead this journey. Lauren’s leadership was critical for initiating the GHG inventory of Gay Lea Foods’ operations and in deciding to partner with Enviro-Stewards to set and achieve GHG reduction targets.

Another challenge was that Gay Lea was one of the first deployments of Stewwi. Simultaneously initiating Stewwi at multiple facilities and employing a variety of sensor types took more time than anticipated. For example, to track incoming natural gas main meters, the utility company required that a pre-qualified contractor install the specialized metering devices. This turned out to be a time-consuming endeavour. However, Gay Lea Foods and Enviro-Stewards worked through these technical and scheduling issues together by adapting the plan and resetting expectations for timelines.

Available capital to implement the more expensive measures had to be found. While the early stages of implementation consisted of quick wins that could rapidly pay for themselves, latter stages require larger investment with longer returns. A concerted effort is needed to inform leadership and ownership of the benefits of the proposed sustainability action plan and the benefits for Gay Lea Foods are certainly there; The identified opportunities across the facilities will cumulatively reduce 5,080,000 m3 of natural gas, 310,000 m3r of water, 9,600 t CO2e and $3.9 million each year.

Gay Lea Foods is actively implementing these opportunities and monitoring the process in Stewwi to verify savings and track real-time progress toward their GHG reduction goals based on the impact of implementing the projects in the Action Plan.
Gay Lea Foods’ ability to initiate and coordinate its sustainability mission in a co-operative consisting of multiple production facilities is an admirable example of environmental leadership. It demonstrates to the world that a farmer-owned dairy company can be as innovative and forward-thinking as any of Canada’s (or the world’s) top environmental innovators.
Furthermore, it demonstrates that environmental sustainability is also profitable, as the estimated cumulative savings are close to $4 million—per year. This also leads to social benefits, as there is less strain on surrounding resources (such as water supplies) and a competitive company has market longevity, providing stable employment to workers and attracting top talent.

The potential 9,600 t CO2e per year of GHG emissions reductions from its manufacturing operations contributes toward fighting climate change. Particularly impactful projects that have been completed are related to the steam boiler systems at various facilities. Improved condensate return, reduced boiler blowdown, and the identification of hidden steam losses have great impact on emissions with fast return on investment.

The systematic approach used in this project: quantify consumption and establish baselines, identify and quantify practical reduction measures, implement the measures, and track results is repeatable for any type of manufacturing facility.
Gay Lea Foods is taking a lead, by bringing butter to our toast, sour cream to our nachos and milk to our tea, all while leaving the smallest possible footprint.