Our Projects/Food & Beverage/Ocean Spray
Food & Beverage
At Ocean Spray’s Lehigh Valley bottling facility, WEI redesigned the plant’s utility concept around high-efficiency hot water, process heat recovery, ductless positive-pressure HVAC and integrated controls.
When Ocean Spray developed its new Lehigh Valley juice bottling facility, the goal was not simply efficient equipment but integrating process heating, cooling, HVAC and utility systems.
The conventional design relied on steam. WEI instead mapped the full thermal path through the juice process and facility — where energy could be delivered at lower temperatures, where heat was rejected, and where it could be reused.
WEI built an integrated energy model during construction and redesigned the utilities around a 230°F hot-water platform, cutting the penalty of generating and distributing steam while improving control, reliability and maintainability.
WEI supplied major energy equipment, developed sequences of operation, programmed controls and supported Check/Test/Start, commissioning, training and performance verification.
Rather than treating process and building loads separately, WEI linked the plant’s hot-water, cooling and HVAC systems so rejected process heat becomes a useful energy source elsewhere.
The juice process heats product for pasteurization, then cools it before filling. WEI found that much of the energy normally rejected during cooling could be recovered instead.
Moderate-temperature recovered heat preheats juice, while lower-temperature tower-water heat feeds HVAC heating coils in season — heating the building with recovered rejection energy rather than purchased energy in winter.
Heat rejected during bottle cooling is captured and reused to reduce the energy required for juice preheating.
WEI’s HVAC strategy uses building pressurization and low-temperature recovered heat to condition the manufacturing space with less air-moving energy.
WEI built the controls architecture and energy dashboard to integrate facility and process systems, compare actual performance with targets, and feed ongoing Monitoring & Verification.
Long-term performance is built into the model: engineer, commission, train operators, monitor, and use real data to find the next optimization.
Ocean Spray’s Lehigh Valley facility became the first U.S. juice plant to pasteurize with hot water instead of steam. Recovered rejection energy lets it use zero purchased energy for building heat in winter.
It shows how food and beverage plants can cut purchased energy by designing process, utility plant, HVAC and controls as one connected thermal system.
WEI’s work with Ocean Spray continued beyond Lehigh Valley — ongoing monitoring and optimization, further heat-recovery evaluations at the plant, and a corporate emissions-reduction assessment across multiple facilities.
The same principle drives the work: understand where energy enters the process, where it is rejected, and how much can be recovered before buying more.
ENGINEERED. INSTALLED. VERIFIED.
WEI connects process, utility and HVAC systems so facilities can recover more energy, purchase less and verify performance over time.
