Weetabix invests £20m in UK and North American sites
Its new production programme ‘Performance Through People’ aims to increase output at its sites while minimising waste and energy consumption.
The company said this would be achieved by upgrading or replacing key processes.
This year’s £20m (€23.9m) is on top of £14m (€16.7m) made across sites in 2011 and 2010.
Burton Latimer focus
All 11 UK sites are to benefit for the current investment, including eight plants in Burton Latimer, two in Corby, Northamptonshire and one in Ashton-under-Lyne.
A company spokesperson told FoodProductionDaily.com: “Most is being spent at Burton Latimer as [this is] the largest plant and where we expect to grow volume and introduce new products.”
She added that that capital would also be spent at both the company’s US plants in Clinton and Cobourg.
Weetabix initially conducted a pilot at Burton Latimer, which was said to have led to 25% raised output. The firm added that waste and energy consumption had also been slashed.
The improvements
The spokesperson said: “In addition to capital spend a major investment in training all members of the workforce in problem solving and the tools of continuous improvement.”
Weetabix told FoodProductionDaily’s site FoodManufacture.co.uk earlier this month that it had teamed up with Competitive Capabilities International, a global operations and manufacturing management consultancy, to implement its TRACC CI system at all its sites.
The system aims to optimise operations by employing a team of engineers to assess the current state against a staged model of best practice and then formulate an improvement plan.
The initiation phase of Weetabix’s the optimisation programme will be completed by the end of this month.
A company spokesperson said that several individual projects will be approved in the next three months with the aim of completing the investment this year.
