Pioneer Firms from the Agri-Food Industry

Abstract

The case of agri-food is exemplary as it has turned sector-specific weaknesses into opportunities for many decades. The major impact on the environment due to its high-consumption processes, as well as frequent and intense contrasts with the rural landscape, clashes with the sector's core values of respecting nature and its inhabitants. This is strongly related with the architecture of the factory and surrounding facilities, and the food and beverage industry has understood, prior to many other sectors, the valuable opportunities that an exemplary factory can create. Not only has the relevance of the subject been recognised in the scientific literature, but also in practice several companies have accepted the challenge. This chapter presents six trends that recur in good agri-food firms around the world, retrieved from a structured examination of case studies. One interesting approach is, for example, to design underground buildings to both lower the visibility of the structure and the demand for space cooling by taking advantage of the ground's thermal properties. Although they are focused on the food and beverage industry, the presented patterns are easily adaptable to other industrial sectors.