UK: Tesco tomato sandwiches power the town of Sandwich

APS supply a wide range of tomatoes to Tesco from Cherry to Beef and everything in between. They are a family business who have been carefully handpicking tomatoes for over 65 years. They plant over 2.2 million tomato plants every season.

Sustainable tomato growth
APS specialise in the production of tomatoes in the most sustainable way possible. Energy efficiency is central to any successful glasshouse business. The glasshouses help to protect the fruit and enable them to control the conditions, optimising them for tomato growth. The heat from the glasshouses is retained along with the CO2 which the tomatoes thrive on and then helps to produce more flavoursome tomatoes.

Tomato Sandwich
One of the glasshouses is based near the town of Sandwich. The combined heat & power unit allows the grower to give electricity to the national power grid. It produces so much extra electricity that they're able to power the town of Sandwich. The units use natural gas to produce electricity, which is fed into the local electricity grid. The waste heat is then used to warm the tomato plants in the glasshouses and waste carbon dioxide produced to help nourish them. APS supply over 211,500 mWh of electricity annually to the National Grid, which powers over 200,000 homes.

Thermal storage tanks work very well with the CHP systems which operate in the day when demand for carbon dioxide is highest, and electricity is required by the National Grid, but the crop doesn’t require heat. When the sun goes down, the hot water stored in thermal storage tanks is pumped back into the glasshouses, to keep the crop warm without the need to run a boiler.

APS were the first UK grower to introduce Combine Heat & Power (CHP) and CO2 extraction for the growing of tomatoes. In 2008 they were the first tomato grower in the world to have a fully closed loop Anaerobic Digestion system.

Source: Tesco