Sustainability Case Study: Carbery Group

Company Overview

Carbery is a global food company, owned by the farmers of West Cork. The company’s goal is to create delicious and nutritious ingredients, flavours and natural cheeses for customers in 50 countries around the world.

Project Objectives

Sustainability is integrated across Carbery’s business on three levels: 

1. Company operations - running a sustainable, efficient, responsible, and profitable business
2. Customers - helping to shape a more sustainable food future
3. Community impact – supporting farmer suppliers, communities, and wider society by sharing benefits and incentivising environmentally sustainable farming practices.

The largest contributor to their site’s Scope 1 carbon emissions is primary energy conversion for process heating. To reduce carbon emissions on their Ballineen production site, Carbery invested in steam meters - with the support of Enterprise Ireland’s EM&T grant - to better quantify and reduce direct steam demand across the facility. 

To further reduce carbon emissions, Carbery was awarded an EERIF capital support to concentrate energy conversion at its Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant and use new waste heat streams to reduce demand for direct steam injection in production processes. 
 

Impact and benefits

With backing from Enterprise Ireland’s GreenStart and GreenPlus supports, Carbery developed an actionable roadmap and embedded sustainability skills across its workforce. They also leveraged the Energy Monitoring and Tracking Systems grant to install steam meters, enabling precise measurement, reducing steam demand and cutting Scope 1 emissions. 

Further capital support facilitated energy conversion upgrades at its CHP plant, allowing waste heat to be repurposed within the production process, further lowering CO2 emissions. Overall, this project led to 1,473 MT CO2 emission reductions and a 7.15 GWh in electricity savings.
 

Find out more

Explore sustainability supports available to Enterprise Ireland clients: Improve sustainability | Business Support | Enterprise Ireland