John Z. Blazevich: CEO Contessa Premium Foods

When it came time for Contessa Premium Foods to build a new frozen-food manufacturing plant last year, CEO John Z. Blazevich decided he didn’t want the 115,000-square-foot, $40 million factory to be just another light-industrial structure at the edge of Los Angeles. He wanted it to stand as a visible example of his $250 million company’s environmental values.

“It’s the right thing to do,” says Blazevich, 53, who emigrated to the United States from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1958. “A lot of people are in this for the return on investment. But I think of this as a way to address greenhouse gases — if we don’t do something about them, in 30 years we won’t be living in the same place we have been.”

From such altruism a test case was born. Blazevich had no road map to follow — no one had ever built an energy-efficient frozen-food plant, and the U.S. Green Building Council hadn’t established any standards for his industry.

Blazevich knew he was facing a challenge: Manufacturing accounts for about 80 percent of industrial energy consumption and energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions, and the food industry is the fifth-largest consumer of energy in manufacturing. Each year, in the U.S. alone, food manufacturers produce more than 105 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions. Contessa manufactures prepared frozen meals sold in major supermarkets across the U.S. The bags of food are assembled inside the ­refrigerated warehouse in Commerce, California, where much of the company’s shrimp, chicken, beef and vegetables are imported.

“Strictly in terms of cubic feet, it’s similar to running 200,000 refrigerators in the same place at the same time,” Blazevich says. “So it took careful planning and innovative thinking to design our ‘green ­cuisine’ plant in a way that significantly minimizes energy use.”

He decided to put his money where his mouth was, shelling out an extra $6 million to make the facility the first in the world to gain a Leadership in Environment and Energy Design (LEED) certificate. The volunteer LEED rating system, developed in 1998 by the U.S. Green Building Council, requires a committee of builders and architects to examine a project for its water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials, design and other factors.

It wasn’t easy. The preparation floor at Contessa is kept at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and the freezers must be kept at zero. That’s a lot of refrigeration, but Blazevich guards the cold air inside the building, which is the length of two football fields, as though it were gold.

Added features, such as a loading dock with gaskets, help keep refrigerated air from escaping; the facility also uses variable-frequency drives that adjust the power to the refrigeration motors to save energy at peak times. The heat used in refrigeration is cycled back to the building’s boilers. A solar panel reduces power consumption, and nearly half of the plant’s construction materials came from within 500 miles, reducing truck traffic and exhaust.

Industry experts are impressed. According to Ken Scalf, a Tennessee architect who sits on the environmental-advisory council for the American Institute of Architects, any building that needs to run around-the-clock refrigeration is difficult to make environmentally friendly. He compares its electricity needs to those of an industrial kitchen, which requires a lot of cooling, or even a research laboratory, which must be constantly ventilated to keep harmful fumes away from employees. (In this sense, Contessa faced a double challenge, as its facility also houses a kitchen where sauces are prepared.) “This was a tough project,” Scalf acknowledges. “A frozen-food facility is a challenge.”

The unexpected dividend from Blazevich’s benevolent intentions? Being green will ultimately save some green. Even without special tax breaks or credits for these environment-friendly upgrades, given the rising cost of power, Contessa expects to quickly reap savings on its electric bills. The extra costs incurred should be covered within five years.

There’s also a marketing plus. The processing facility doesn’t look like much from the highway, but Blazevich hopes it will stand as a monument to the direction in which he wants to take his 24-year-old company, which is headquartered in San Pedro, at the Los Angeles harbor. As climate change becomes a more prominent political and social issue, manufac­turers will need to show that their invisible back-end operations are as clean and responsible as the face they show the public.

“We have always worked hard to achieve the quality product that we sell, but it’s not about that anymore,” Blazevich says. “It’s how you produce it — and that’s what we’ll be measured by.” 

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