Specific Energy: kWh per Tonne of Product
Normalising by production, why cross-subsector comparisons mislead, and building the per-tonne baseline that makes a factory's performance measurable.
10 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead · Last reviewed July 2026
"How efficient is this factory?" has only one honest starting point in food manufacturing: kilowatt-hours per tonne of product. Absolute consumption tells you nothing (a busy month and a wasteful month look identical on the meter), and cross-industry benchmarks tell you little more, because a bakery, a dairy and a frozen-meals plant are thermodynamically different businesses. This lesson builds the specific energy consumption (SEC) discipline: what to divide by what, how to separate the base load that hygiene fixes from the load that production drives, and how to use your own site's history as the benchmark that actually matters.