ON Regional Economic Development

A new resource for food and agri-tech producers to gain valuable knowledge to improve productivity, efficiency, and environmental performance. 

The “Playbook” describes a roadmap for efficient food and agri-tech production aligned with environmental efficiency. No two businesses are exactly alike. Facilities, equipment configurations, peoples’ skills and infrastructure differ.  

Delivering food safety, productivity, efficiency, and environmental performance involves skills and technology. These four fundamentals remain the same across manual, mechanical, automated and digitized facilities. The Playbook provides a game plan to sort out competing needs no matter the scale of a business.  

This tactical guide provides a situational analysis to help guide an individualized game plan for action and identifies skills and practices that addresses these needs based upon a sequence for actions to minimize the unintended consequence of cost variables. 

The playbook addresses six challenges faced by manufacturers: 

• the hamster wheel of energy audits 
• the Lean Team picked all the low-hanging fruit
• why automation can fail to deliver expected results 
• why so many end-of-pipe solutions disagree with the bottom line 
• how to make less waste so that end-of-pipe solutions cost less 
• how to prioritize efficiency actions in a sequence to achieve efficiency and productivity

The playbook has been posted to the Ontario website and can be found at: https://www.ontario.ca/document/food-manufacturers-playbook.