Food NW helps local businesses save a million.

£1m in business cost savings identified by specialist support service for food and drink firms

Food and drink companies across the North West of England passed a £1 million milestone in the last month, thanks to Food NW, which delivers the ENWORKS environmental support service to businesses in the food and drink sector.

Food NW has been delivering the free support to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) since April 2010. Our advisers have now identified annual cost savings of £1.05 million in the region’s businesses, by finding ways to manage energy, water, materials and waste more efficiently.

Work is well underway with 225 different improvement projects to implement and monitor these savings through to completion.

In the process, Food NW is helping local businesses to achieve annual environmental savings of over 1,700 tonnes of CO2e and 59,600 m3 of water, as well as hundreds of tonnes of materials and waste diverted from landfill per year.

Programme manager Andy Scully, said: “The £1 million mark is an important milestone for our work with the ENWORKS programme.

“There’s a great deal of scope for SMEs to get ahead of the competition by making straightforward efficiency improvements which can be implemented at no cost at all to businesses.”

ENWORKS is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary. Since 2011 it has helped more than 10,000 businesses through a range of partner organisations across the North West, helping businesses to reduce operational costs, manage risk and improve profitability by improving their environmental performance.

Earlier this month ENWORKS joined the Economic Solutions Group as part of a strategic transfer, but it's support to businesses, through Food NW and its other partner organisations across the North West, has been unaffected by the move.

ENWORKS support is currently funded by the Northwest Regional Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund until 2013 and is part of the Government’s ‘Solutions for Business’ package of support to help businesses grow and thrive.