Research articleCentralized and distributed food manufacture: A modeling platform for technological, environmental and economic assessment at different production scales
Introduction
At the beginning of the 18th Century, manufacturing was carried out by small facilities located close to consumers. Products were developed using craft methods by artisan manufacturers spread across communities. Their target market was the local neighborhood, and in this way local demand was satisfied (Cipolla, 2003). The Industrial Revolution established a factory system, which combined machinery with sources of power, and gathered a high number of workers under supervision (Schmenner, 2001). The production of goods was relocated into big facilities, achieving rise in productivity and great cost reduction. Such Centralized Manufacturing, taking advantage of technology and economies of scale (Helpman, 1981), uses a small number of very large production plants to satisfy the whole demand for a good in a certain country, and possibly overseas demand via exports (Roos et al., 2016). The final product must be standardized as large-scale production requires a standard product for the entire market. Many regional characteristics were therefore lost. These plants can be built far from the market, seeking cheaper labor and taxes. As a consequence of such centralization, the concept of supply chain arises (Fahimnia et al., 2013).
The food Industry is the largest industry sector in the UK contributing £113 billion to the economy (DEFRA, 2017). The food supply chain comprises several stages (Tassou et al., 2014): (i) production or farming of raw materials (ii) transport of raw materials to the processing facility (iii) manufacture of the food product (iv) distribution from manufacturers to retailers (shop or restaurant) (v) retail storage (vi) sale. Each stage involves financial cost, energy consumption and environmental impact. The UK food supply chain consumes 367 TWh every year (18% of total energy) and is responsible for 147 Mt CO2 e. emissions (15% of total associated to UK) (DEFRA, 2017). Transport costs are significant.
Thus, a partial return to low scale manufacture situated near customers could be more environmentally acceptable, minimizing transport and storage cost is the up-to-date research in this field. These two attributes, i.e. small scale and location close to customers (decentralization), set the basis for Distributed Manufacturing (Cottee, 2014). Drivers for this change include new technologies, rising logistics costs, and changing global economies (Matt et al., 2015). Fig. 1 schematically shows Centralized and Distributed Manufacturing.
At low throughput, fixed costs become too expensive for large plants and this drives the cost above the market price. The advantages of the economies of scale are lost (Ruffo et al., 2006) so an alternative manufacturing system must be found. Such alternative could be Artisan Manufacture. Craft production at small scale can provide fresh and trusted local food, for example following traditional recipes developed by local chefs (Kuznesof et al., 1997). Each local craft manufacturer can introduce variations on the product, resulting in local customization (Rauch et al., 2016). Locating manufacture close to consumers shortens the supply chain, so energy use related to distribution and storage will decrease (Srai et al., 2016) as well as emissions caused by transportation. Shorter supply chains can also provide fresher and natural products. The brewery sector in the UK can be taken as a good example of this return to artisan/craft manufacture, with a growth of 184% in the number of microbreweries between 2002 and 2013 (Ellis and Bosworth, 2015).
Decentralization is a scale-down problem, addressing the loss of economies of scale. There are few studies (Angeles-Martinez et al., 2018) on how these scenarios might unfold. In this work, we proposed a model-based methodology to evaluate and compare the profitability of different food manufacturing scenarios across a wide range of production scales and decentralization alternatives.
The basis of this methodology will be illustrated using a dry food product (dry cereal porridge, reconstitutable with the addition of water or milk). The manufacture of dried foods is energy intensive due to the heat loads required to remove all the water in the products (Ladha-Sabur et al., 2019), although transportation and storage is cheap, as no energy is required for preservation and its specific volume is low as they are dehydrated. An efficient result for dry foods would suggest profitability for products that could take more potential advantages from decentralized manufacture methods, such as refrigerated and frozen goods.
Section snippets
General description of the manufacture process
Two different manufacturing methods are considered in this work: industrial and artisanal production. Table 1 lists the most representative production conditions and equipment for each case. Industrial production is based on a process line (Fig. 2(a)), whilst Artisan production keeps the same unit operations but at smaller scales. This requires changes in the equipment (see Fig. 2(b)) and other manufacturing aspects, e.g. batch operation. Further equipment details (e.g. prices, dimensions,
Model description
The model describes the manufacture of dry cereal porridge based on both industrial and artisanal manufacturing flowsheets. This allows the scale-down and comparison of the different scenarios studied at a range of production rates (from 0.5 kg/h up to 6000 kg/h). The whole set of equations includes mass and energy balances – used to design the process unit operations (i.e. drying) and evaluate energy demand – economic analysis and carbon footprint estimation. The viability of each production
Results and discussion
The designed tool generates data for different scenarios. For each, it provides cost estimation, design of equipment, number of facilities and labor requires, energy demand and GHG emissions associated, etc. Different manufacturing scales are compared by finding operating cost per kilogram of product manufactured over the full range of scales. The profitability of one scale over the others is therefore set by the cost per unit, assuming the selling price is constant.
The data is analyzed to find
Overview: food manufacture trends and challenges
One of the issues that centralized manufacturing faces is the search for differentiation of products. Mass customization, delivering differentiated or personalized products with near mass production efficiency, is the goal for many companies in the current diversified marketplace (Tseng and Hu, 2014). However, mass customization with centralization still creates lengthy supply chains. Distributed Manufacture (DM) systems could solve many of the issues of centralized production. Local variation
Conclusions
A model-based tool for the design, simulation and cost estimation of manufacturing process at several scales of production has been developed and used to assess the profitability of four different scenarios, from decentralized manufacturing (HM, FI and DM) to centralized manufacturing (SP and MP), in the production of a dried food. Operating regions, namely unfeasible, transition and plateau, have been identified for each manufacturing scale. Crossover points showing the boundaries of operation
Acknowledgment
Authors acknowledge financial support received from the Centre for Sustainable Energy Use in Food Chains — CSEF (EPSRC grant no. EP/K011820/1).
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