Sustainable Food Factory 2026 – Panel Discussion

Participants:

• Glenn Evans, Group Head of Sustainability, Noble Foods
• James Foggo, Solar PV Sales Manager, Noble Green Energy
• Jason Hayward Jones, Farming Lead, Cefetra Ecosystem Services
• Simon Borthwick, European Business Head – Fertiliser, Cefetra Group
• Gordon Pope, Chief Operating Officer, Bluestone Energy

Key discussion points

• Collaboration is essential – reducing emissions and improving resilience requires manufacturers, farmers, energy providers and supply chain partners to work together.
• Energy resilience is becoming a business priority – on-site solar PV and battery storage can help reduce energy costs, improve energy security and support decarbonisation.
• Funding options are evolving – Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and other financing models are making renewable energy more accessible without significant upfront capital investment.
• Scope 3 emissions require supply chain engagement – meaningful carbon reductions depend on working closely with suppliers, growers and customers.
• Regenerative agriculture is creating new opportunities – sustainable farming practices can benefit food production while opening up additional revenue streams through carbon markets.
• Knowledge is often the biggest barrier – many technologies and solutions already exist, but greater awareness and education are needed to help businesses make informed decisions.
• The future is increasingly electrified – from manufacturing processes to logistics, electrification is driving demand for smarter energy infrastructure and storage.
• There is no one-size-fits-all solution – every site and supply chain is different, requiring tailored approaches to energy generation, storage and sustainability.

Key takeaway

Energy resilience, decarbonisation and long-term cost control are no longer separate challenges. The panel agreed that collaboration across the food supply chain, combined with practical renewable energy solutions and innovative funding models, will play a critical role in helping businesses achieve all three.

Introduction – How these businesses are Delivering Energy Resilience, Cost Control & Decarbonisation across the Value Chain

Glenn Evans, Noble Foods

“When we first looked at our carbon footprint, and got our target validated in October 2024, that gave us a renewed focus in terms of our energy use, but how are we going to cope with the challenge of making the reductions that we need. Our targets are for Scope 1 and 2, 42% reduction by 2030, SBTI verified.

We also looked at whether we want to buy REGOs to cover our Scope 2 emissions, so the electricity that we use, do we just want to go out to the market and buy renewable electricity or do we want to take the more difficult route, but where we have complete control over our energy, that’s to go the location-based route. A couple of reasons for that – we had one of the providers of the REGO pull the plug, which would have meant that six months of the year we would have been on brown energy. With our location-based target approved we could look at how we reduce our Scope 2 emissions. The obvious solution for us was to look at renewables, so for Noble Green Energy to spec up our sites, prioritise those sites that solar would do really well on, and also where we had challenges. So on a lot of the sites, if they had a decent enough roof we’d put panels on those. But we did have a challenging site where it was poor agricultural land, which flooded at certain times of the year. But that actually lent itself really well to a ground-mount system. Noble Green Energy specified those projects up and we’ve seen a really good return on investment.”

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“In the agriculture marketplace, there is an issue on conflict with agricultural land and solar. We try and use agricultural land where it has a lower yield, categorised at a lower level, and there are less economic benefits from that particular parcel of land. The one Glenn refers to, was exactly that ­– we were able to assess the client’s roof space and land space, and come up with the right solution to achieve the sustainability and decarbonisation goals.”

Simon Borthwick, Cefetra Group

“Fertiliser trading is slightly problematic at the moment, which emphasises the supply chain role we fulfil in this sector around problem solving, with geopolitical issues we have to manage, and are going to be managing more often, but also in terms of Scope 3 emissions. We’re supplying something like five million tonnes of raw material into the feed, food and energy sectors. We originate a lot of that grain from farms, and farmers are under pressure to change the way they grow their crops, and our consumers are under pressure to improve their carbon footprint and meet their Scope 3 and 2030 emission commitments. So our role is to try and find solutions for that, and mine in particular is how can we find raw materials and crop nutrition products that give us self-sufficiency, resilience and sustainability of our businesses, our farm businesses, and consumers as well.”

Jason Hayward Jones, Cefetra Ecosystem Services

“We’re from a farming background, but there are massive connections [with the Food & Beverage industry]. What we do, and what I do in particular, is I have the pleasure of driving around the country, helping farmers in their transition to regenerative agriculture. We work with our initial group of farmers, about 100 of them, about 50,000 hectares. It’s not small, but we help them with their transition. Traditionally people think of the food supply chain as farm, aggregator, processor, and one of those food brands you find on the shelf of your supermarket – that’s traditionally what we’ve been involved with. Just to glimpse into the future, that food supply chain is becoming more and more diversified, and so whilst I speak to farmers and help them with their transition with regen agriculture, I also speak to Google and Microsoft about buying carbon credits from our farmers and loop back money incentives to farmers to help encourage more and more transition. More and more we’re taking good practices from the farm, quantifying them in carbon credits, linking in the industry that possibly has the deepest pockets, and putting it very quickly back into the farming industry. It’s satisfying that it’s moving quickly, making a lot of headway.”

Gordon Pope, Bluestone Energy

“Solar and battery are not a new technology, they are a known technology deployed at scale globally and in the UK, and there’s this perfect synergy we’ve found of deploying that in the agricultural space where there is land, a carbon demand and a fight for Capex, and there is a [need for] protection from global political shock. And there’s a solution that seems to tick all the boxes in an ideal way at the one time. At Bluestone, we consider ourselves a developer, because we take a project from complete concept – do you have land or not have land, does it need planning or not, does it need finance or not. With the options out there, what we’re finding now is we’re spending most of our time on that educational piece that these [options such as Power Purchase Agreements] exist, and all the benefits that they create right away.”

Where is on-site generation delivering the biggest impact? Is it solar?

Gordon Pope, Bluestone Energy

“Since October of last year, we haven’t come up with a scheme that’s been solar only. It’s been solar and BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) co-located. In the UK, as you know, it’s not sunny all the time, but there is a perfect blend of the battery costs that have reduced dramatically (so by five-fold in five years, so by half and by half again effectively), and the technology is becoming specific in that it can be deployed in that commercial and industrial space. So they can be inside, they can be fire-protected, they can be outside, they can be on land, you can get the exact megawatts for what you need for your demand. So the two of them combined, a solar-only project could make your energy independence 30% to 40%, but with battery it jumps to 50%, 60% and sometimes 70% of your site could be fully independent of the grid, at that reduced price. So, the technology has not changed, but the costs have changed, and that’s changed the solution dramatically.”

Is cost the biggest barrier? Is that what’s stopping these projects moving forward?

Gordon Pope, Bluestone Energy

“No, I think it’s education. It’s not on anyone’s radar until it’s too late. If we go back to the point of global political shock, and it’s now how do we forecast for rising costs in the next six months, or a year. And it’s about making that jump, because there’s Capex free solutions, there’s looking at roof space, there’s looking at land space. Nothing’s a barrier in coming up with a solution that’s going to reduce your energy from year one, it’s getting the time to get around everybody and tell them this is available. We can do modelling and financial solutions that don’t require any input, any oversight, no site management, no asset management over the lifetime. It’s about people knowing that’s there, is the bigger barrier.

Aside from agricultural business, what has been interesting in the last months, other public bodies have been coming on, the NHS, National Rail, they’ve been putting out Private Wire tenders recently. So it’s slowly trickling through that this is a real solution. It’s about getting around to explain that.”

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“With Food & Beverage there’s a huge, huge, cost burden on the manufacturing process, and where there can be Capex investment, there’s always going to be pressures on Capex for other things. The Power Purchase Agreement, the Private Wire can be the way to go – zero Capex, zero maintenance, but all the power benefits, all the sustainability and de-carb benefits sit alongside that. Also then, when you factor in the use of regenerative farming in the ingredients proposition, you factor in the fertilisers that are coming into the market through Cefetra, we get an overall de-carb, sustainability concept, which everybody here in front of you is deeply involved in. All the companies are embedded in that, embedded in F&B together.”

Glenn Evans, Noble Foods

“Scope 1 has always been a bit of a challenge. We’re quite heavy users of fuel, gas, and we have quite a large logistics fleet as well. So if you look to our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, around two-thirds of that is in the fleet, so transportation around the UK. But there’s a depot charging scheme grant that’s available. A lot of HGV fleet operators have said by 2035 the internal combustion engine is going to go, and they’re kind of hedging their bets on going for electrification at this moment in time. So we’ve got a deadline, the government has got a deadline as well. They came out towards the end of last year and put out a grant for everybody to apply. What this involves is electrifying your HGV fleet, or smaller, like 3.5-tonne and 7.5-tonne vehicles, and then putting in a depot charging scheme at one of your depots as well.

You can either do this by having sufficient grid capacity, but a lot of our sites tend to be rural, so we don’t have that sufficient grid capacity at this moment in time. So the other option that they gave was that you could have solar and BESS, so battery and storage systems. Now, this is quite complicated system that we actually went for. But working with Noble Green Energy, we managed to design a system that seems to be acceptable to the grant authority. And now we’re just waiting on that decision to come through, which I’m really excited about. It will mean vehicle replacements going from diesel to electric HGVs. And also we can actually demonstrate that on a real life pilot; Which depots are we going to transport to? Is it going to work in real life in terms of going out to a depot, coming back? Do we have sufficient charge time? But for me, that’s a real answer to deal with one of the significant problems with Scope 1 emissions.”

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“The pressures are constantly evolving in sustainability and decarbonisation throughout, and it’s every aspect of it. We’ve discussed here, from the fertiliser issue and how we decarb that. That is something I think that’s a fascinating prospect for agriculture, which in turn leads us to our food processing.”

Simon Borthwick, Cefetra Group

“Just touching on electrification, we have 700 or 800 trucks a day moving around the country, delivering raw materials. We have vessels arriving. So we have the same driver as Noble Foods in terms of minimising that. So, if Cefetra Ecosolution Systems can take the crops that we grow through our farming network that are operating in a regen, more sustainable fashion. We load those onto electrified trucks to take them to Noble Foods to process the product. That’s the kind of supply chain that we’re talking about here. Sounds quite simple. In practice, it takes a little bit of work.

One of the key things on the fertiliser side is, in the last five years, we’ve had two wars that have caused massive disruption. So it’s a driver for us to look at the supply chain and how we manage this disruption. This is all quite a lot more complicated than we’re used to, but there is some new technology around growing crops in a more sustainable fashion, less reliance on imports, growing more from less, which we’re all being driven to do. But I think the biggest problem is that it’s not an energy problem, it’s more of a knowledge transfer problem.

I think farmers are fundamentally risk takers. They put a seed in the ground and 10 months later hope that it’s a crop. Obviously, they know their stuff, but they’re relying on weather and those kind of [variables]. How much more risk are they going to put into that process of growing [crops] and how do we help them manage the process of change? So whether that’s how they grow it, how they power their robotic or electric tractors or whatever it might be. And that’s the biggest challenge from our side, is that knowledge transfer is understood, it’s science-based, there’s a return on your investment.”

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“I think it is the whole electrification of industry, of all aspects of industry. From simple lighting and refrigeration, down to trucks, down to movement, down to absolutely everything. And it’s finding the ability to control that as best we can. That then comes back to how do we fund it?

We were speaking this week about a project, as a case study example, where we had a client who had set a particular CapEx budget on a project of £340,000, which will provide a certain amount of solar. But their consumption on site, was actually almost 10 megawatt. That’s a huge amount. Yet they had restricted their cash flow, their CapEx investment in that, to £340,000.

We came up with a solution that identified some agricultural land that was of a certain classification. And we now have the ability of about 7 megawatt of solar PV, with a similar size BESS alongside that, and offering them their electricity at a discounted rate, alongside the CapEx investment. So companies can put CapEx into it and we can do a Power Purchase Agreement alongside it.”

Gordon Pope, Bluestone Energy

“I think the important thing as well, is that it’s day one savings, it’s a reduction in carbon, it’s a reduction on outgoing costs and savings on electricity costs, and it’s the ability to use that CapEx somewhere else.”

Jason Hayward Jones, Cefetra Ecosystem Services

“There’s also an issue that’s crept up on us quite quickly. It’s the construction of data centre infrastructure and the use of AI. It’s the infrastructure that is quite challenging, when you consider that every time you ping off a quick prompt to ChatGPT, just a simple one on an edge data centre, 2gm of greenhouse gas are emitted from the infrastructure and it uses approximately 9ml of water, and it does that 2.5 billion times a day. And that adds up. And that’s a downward pressure on the resources available within a catchment area to grow food.

The upside of that, though, is the people that are constructing the data centres and the people that rent space to the data centres want to cycle money back to the farmers to help them practice more regenerative agriculture to offset the data centres. So, if we think about it cleverly, there’s a lot of opportunity.”

Glenn Evans, Noble Foods

“I think AI can be extremely useful when you’re dealing with large data sets, it can do a job very quickly that could take days. But I think we need protocols around each use, because unnecessary use, whatever it may be, can undo all the good work that we’re trying to do in reducing our carbon footprint.”

Can you tell us more about Scope 2 and 3 emissions?

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“Scope 2 is the onsite consumption of power, and as part of Noble Green Energy we can provide the solar alongside the BESS. It’s important to balance out the power generation and the consumption on site, and sometimes that is uniquely solar, but in many cases, particularly on larger scale consuming sites, we’re also putting BESS into that on the Scope 2 side.

The Scope 3 side is far more complex and far harder to manage. With Noble Foods, for example, Noble Green Energy are engaging with the supply chain farms, to open up solar PV and battery storage. We’re also opening up various financial incentives and benefits from that and how they fund that internally. It typically doesn’t get to the level of Power Purchase Agreements, because supply chain farms are typically smaller (unless they are larger, where we can involve Power Purchase Agreements). But we can include asset finance solutions there too.

We’ve done quite a lot on the poultry side, particularly, and that’s something that we look to grow out and make sure that solar on poultry sheds, for example, is considered right from day one with those projects. Likewise, Noble Green Energy can assist with energy solutions for the Cefetra regenerative farming supply chain.”

Glenn Evans, Noble Foods

“So in terms of our overall emissions, 70% to 80% of those are Scope 3. So without having collaborations like this, we would have such a challenge in trying to reduce that. We do have a milling operation. So in effect, we’re a vertically integrated company. So we have 250 producer farms, which James was referring to there. We have six mills around the country, two packing centres, and predominantly we’re packing eggs. So we’re taking eggs from those laying farms, but then we feed the majority of those farms as well. So if you wrapped all that in one, raw materials that we mill are one of the biggest inputs into those Scope 3 emissions. So without this kind of relationship, collaboration with the supply chain, it’d be very difficult to tackle any of those emissions.”

Simon Borthwick, Cefetra Group

“Put simply, we supply a lot of raw materials into Noble Foods so they can feed hens. We all have a joint responsibility around our Scope 3 emissions and targets. We are only three or four harvests away [from the targets]. We have to find a solution to feed those hens in a more sustainable way. We source from around the world, and a lot from our UK farmer customers. So we started Cefetra Ecosystem Services, where we reward our farmers for farming in a more sustainable fashion. We built a scheme that is an in-setting scheme, so if we reward them with certificates for their carbon, their efforts to create a lower carbon product to go into Noble Foods. We transfer that product within the supply chain, to grow food, to feed hens. That’s how very simplistically how we’ve grown what was already a strong relationship. We don’t have all the answers. And we committed three years ago with farmers, knowing that we didn’t have all the answers. But if we didn’t commit and get people to grow to meet these targets, then we wouldn’t be able to have a conversation about how we help them resolve those Scope 3 emissions. We are integrated and we are intimately involved in making this a success.”

Gordon Pope, Bluestone Energy

“And the simplicity is, it’s never too late. We are working with a project with Noble Green Energy where it’s a large rooftop solar, but the roof is at an age where it’s unable to accomodate the solar. We’ve incorporated [Bluestone Energy] paying for the roof and the Power Purchase Agreement for the energy. Noble Green Energy have a subcontractor to install the roof, then install the solar on top, and then that goes back to the customer as as one saving. So we found a very simple find a solution to still get the savings, even if you think you’re restricted somehow.”

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“So this company’s roof was non-compliant for solar PV. The client then had the burden of £400,000 to £500,000 to re-roof their factory. There’s lots of other pressures on that CapEx. That CapEx could have been spent in so many different ways for that business, but it was a must have, they had to repair the roof. So, Bluestone alongside Noble Green Energy through our project management, (because we need the roof to be correct for our solar to be installed upon it), got the re-roof, we have the solar PV, we have battery energy storage systems, all completely wrapped up, and a Power Purchase Agreement at a pence per kilowatt, at no expense to the client.”

What is one piece of advice for someone to take away to make a real impact in their facility or supply chain?

Glenn Evans, Noble Foods

“We’re still learning this, but engagement with your supply chain is key. So start making those relationships, find out what people are really good at, what you can offer with the supply chain as well, and just keep that conversation going. I think this challenge is too big for one company to do themselves. So I would say start that engagement as soon as you can really.”

Jason Hayward Jones, Cefetra Ecosystem Services

“I’d say, think outside the box. Who would have thought that we could, over three years with our Cefetra Ecosystem Services project, to link farmers with Microsoft. The worst they can say is no, but they haven’t said no yet.”

James Foggo, Noble Green Energy

“Collaborate, work together, seek out like-minded partners. Share goals, share visions. We all have a commercial vested interest in what we’re proposing here, and a heritage in food and beverage.”

Gordon Pope, Bluestone Energy

“One key takeaway for me is, it costs nothing to find out. Supply data and see if there’s an opportunity there. You don’t need to worry about where to start. Somebody will take care of that for you and it costs nothing and then you can move on from there.”

Simon Borthwick, Cefetra Group

“One thing we’ve learnt – you can’t tell people how to farm. They know how to farm. All we can do is put offers in front of them, but people want to do the right thing, they want to farm in the right way. But don’t be too prescriptive about what you’re doing, and we’ll learn. It’s the same as the offers that we make to Noble Foods – we think we’re right, but we’ve got to work together and be not too prescriptive about what we’re doing and learn from each other.”

For further information on any of the experts involved:

Noble Green Energy: https://noblegreenenergy.co.uk/ getintouch@noblegreenenergy.co.uk

Noble Foods: https://www.noblefoods.co.uk/

Cefetra: https://cefetra.co.uk/

Cefetra Ecosolution Systems: https://www.cefetra-ecosystem-services.com/

Bluestone Energy: https://bluestoneenergy.co.uk/