How achievable is a 20% reduction in drinking water use in your production?

The Dutch government wants companies to reduce their drinking water use by 20% by 2035.

It’s an ambitious goal and for many businesses, it sounds nearly impossible.
Yet some food producers are already achieving such savings. Not through major renovations or drastic process changes, but through smart optimizations.
The key? Knowing where you lose the most water, and how to prevent it.

The challenge: water use hides in invisible details

In food production, the highest water consumption often doesn’t come from the product itself, but from everything surrounding it:

• Cleaning of installations, machines, conveyors, and pipelines
• Rinsing processes after batch changes or allergen switches
• Loss flows during production (e.g. product residues left behind)
• Manual rinsing of surfaces that are difficult to clean

These are often the sources of hidden waste. Think of an operator rinsing for two extra minutes “just to be safe”, or scheduled downtime that leads to excessive cleaning.

The saving opportunity you may not see: surface technology

Many food companies focus their water-saving efforts on reuse or recirculation.
But there’s an extra, often overlooked, step: needing less water for cleaning in the first place. That’s where surface technology comes in.

With specialized coatings, surfaces in your production line can:

• accumulate less product, leaving fewer residues,
• be cleaned faster and more effectively with less water,
• and require less frequent deep cleaning cycles.

This technology has been successfully applied for years in demanding sectors like dairy, plant-based products, and oils.

A real-world example

A customer in the plant-based food industry was using around 1,200 liters of drinking water per day to clean one production line.
After applying an easy-to-clean coating to conveyors and spiral gutters, the cleaning time was reduced by 35%, and water use dropped by over 25%.

Additional benefits included shorter downtime and reduced use of cleaning agents.

What’s the return?

✅ You contribute to the government’s 20% reduction target
✅ You reduce dependency on increasingly scarce drinking water
✅ You can include results in your ESG strategy or CSRD reporting
✅ You lower operational costs (energy, labor, water)
✅ You future-proof your production process

In our next blog, we’ll show how we help companies turn these insights into action, through a quick scan or in-depth analysis.

Don’t want to wait? Schedule an appointment.