Wednesday, June 24, 2015 by Cheryl Baldwin
Few things are more disruptive to a processing facility than losing power – especially if several weeks’ worth of work is lost each time it happens. Facing this risk helped drive Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. to embed sustainability into the way it does business. The result is a demonstration of one of the principles in my book, The 10 Principles of Food Industry Sustainability: ensuring that food and ingredient processing both requires minimal inputs and outputs and strives toward generating resources. Sierra Nevada not only lives up to this standard but also gains business advantages along the way.
With the threat of losing a substantial amount of production, Sierra Nevada worked toward energy self-sufficiency through the combination of on-site energy production and dramatic energy conservation measures. This necessity-driven embrace of sustainability spurred the company to find a way to more formally honor fundamental values they held since their early days, as Cheri Chastain, Sustainability Manager for Sierra Nevada notes: “resource efficiency and respect for what we have are core to the company.”