This past January, Contessa Premium Foods opened their Green Cuisine Plant -- the world's first energy-efficient frozen food plant. Located on the Los Angeles harbor, Contessa's $40 million Green Cuisine plant is successfully up and running, and has already reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by a ton a day -- a significant achievement in an industry known for high energy use. What's more, the Green Cuisine plant will produce up to 150 million pounds of product in the first year alone. Next month, the company will introduce their new Green Cuisine packaging for their international array of convenience meals that are now being produced at the plant.

Contessa president and CEO John Z. Blazevich is a longtime environmentalist and a trailblazer in green business. His $250-million, 24-year-old company has always done its part to protect the environment -- from its sustainable and turtle-friendly shrimp production to its use of recycled packaging. Blazevich has spent $6 million to make the new plant "green." To build his Green Cuisine plant, Blazevich did not wait for environmental standards to be established, but instead he collaborated with the United States Green Building Council and raised the bar for the entire industry. This is the first LEED-certified frozen food plant.

Because of the nature and scope of any manufacturing process, reducing energy use to the point of achieving LEED-certification is a daunting prospect. But because Contessa manufactures frozen food, the company had the added challenge of designing an energy-efficient, four-million-cubic-foot facility that's almost entirely temperature-controlled -- at a maximum of 40 degrees and a minimum of zero.

"Strictly in terms of cubic feet, it's similar to running 200,000 refrigerators in the same place, at the same time," said Blazevich. "So it took careful planning and innovative thinking to design our Green Cuisine plant in a way that significantly minimizes energy use."

The new plant actually surpasses LEED standards. Blazevich and his engineering team have developed "first-to-market" innovations, such as a heat-redirection system that has never before been used in a temperature-controlled environment. The system involves capturing waste heat produced by superheated refrigerant gases as they leave refrigeration compressors. These gases are redirected to a heat exchanger, condensed into liquid form, and then used to heat water encountered in a unique circulation system.

Some of the other notable energy-saving features include:
A solar-power array that reduces carbon dioxide emissions by more than 730,000 pounds each year, producing an effect similar to conserving 276 acres of pine forest -- roughly the size of 209 football fields, including end zones -- each year. An innovative loading dock that prevents the loss of refrigerated air, reducing temperature fluctuation -- and energy use -- in the loading dock area. Variable frequency drives that adjust the amount of power supplied to motors at specific times or under specific conditions to keep energy use to a minimum.
Manufacturing accounts for about 80 percent of industrial energy consumption and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, and the food industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy in the manufacturing arena. Each year, in the U.S. alone, food manufacturers produce more than 105 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions.