Local and decentralised scenarios for ice-cream manufacture: A model-based assessment at different production scales

摘要

Decentralised food manufacture - e.g. a cloud of small local production sites and shorter distribution networks - can be a powerful tool in the development of more sustainable and safe food chains. In this context, new processing scenarios based on emerging "on-demand" and "sharing" models, together with distributed manufacture methods, are potential alternatives to the current centralised paradigm. However, studies on how these new processing scenarios might unfold are scarce.This work presents a techno-economic and carbon footprint assessment of different ice-cream manufacture scenarios, i.e. Multi-Plant (MP), Single-plant (SP), Distributed Manufacturing (DM), Food Incubator (FI) and Home Manufacturing (HM) that cover a wide range of scales (0.01 kg/h to 50,000 kg/h) and increasing decentralised production. Results revealed at what production level different processing scales become profitable, demonstrating that the shift on manufacture paradigm can be studied as a scale-down engineering problem and showing how decisions between local and centralised manufacture can be made.