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

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. •A techno-economic and environmental assessment for ice cream manufacture is presented.•Decentralised manufacturing systems are compared to centralised processing.•A virtual processing facility for ice cream was developed.•Profitable scales for all production scales are identified.