Value Stream Map and energy consumption in agro-industrial juice fruit processing

The objective of this study is to provide a good "benchmark" case in juice fruit production plants for comparing their performance in terms of energy consumption and final product "yield". In particular, the industrial step-by-step processes performed for the production of natural fresh orange juice, fruit juices and purees will be dissected, also referring to the operations. By exploiting the Value Stream Mapping (VSM) methodology, we report general energy consumptions due to the main production processes and highlight the most energy-intensive ones, in order to provide a base for the selection of useful and reasonable key performance indicators. Furthermore, we include some sectorial KPIs that have been extracted from the literature. [Publisher's text].