The short version. Published UK benchmarks put an independent food or drink producer at roughly 20,000 to 120,000 kWh of electricity and 20,000 to 150,000 kWh of gas a year, which is about £6,800 to £40,900 on the bill. Most independent producers land between £15,000 and £40,000. The largest single lever is not your equipment. It is whether your contract was negotiated or simply left to roll.
Why a producer bill does not look like a shop bill
Retail energy is shaped like trading hours. Production energy is not. A bakery deck oven comes up to temperature at 3am or 4am, hours before the first sale. A retarder prover holds dough at a set temperature seven nights a week whether you baked that day or not. A brewery glycol chiller runs every hour of every day, brew day or no brew day. A cold store holds kegs, cake or cooked product through the quiet weeks as well as the busy ones.
That gives you two demands on one meter. A heat load that is spiky, mostly gas and concentrated into a few hours. And a refrigeration and services baseload that is flat, entirely electric and never stops. Neither lines up with when the till is open.
The published research agrees. Carbon Trust work on UK industrial bakeries put ovens, provers, coolers and steam plant at 50 to 60 per cent of the sector footprint, roughly 0.8 kWh per kilogram of baked goods, and sector data on small food production sites puts refrigeration and high temperature cooking at more than half of energy spend. In brewing, a UK benchmark of about 42 kWh of gas per hectolitre means a 3,000 hectolitre brewery buys around 126,000 kWh of gas a year, close to £8,800 at 7p per kWh before you touch the electricity.
The equipment that sets the shape
These are the loads we see on the meters, with the annual ranges we publish for the sector:
- Deck, rack and tunnel ovens (gas): 30,000 to 120,000 kWh a year, about £2,100 to £8,400.
- Electric convection, combi and roasting ovens: 8,000 to 30,000 kWh, about £2,000 to £7,500.
- Steam boilers, coppers, stills and jacketed kettles (gas): 20,000 to 110,000 kWh, about £1,400 to £7,700.
- Refrigeration, walk-in chillers and cold stores: 10,000 to 45,000 kWh, about £2,500 to £11,250.
- Glycol chillers, compressed air, extraction and lighting: 8,000 to 35,000 kWh, about £2,000 to £8,750.
- Provers, retarders, mixers and depositors: 4,000 to 16,000 kWh, about £1,000 to £4,000.
Look at the bottom half of that list. Refrigeration, glycol, compressed air and the prover are things you cannot switch off, and on a small site they can outweigh the ovens. That is the load your unit rate is really buying.
Typical annual usage and bills by business type
These are the figures we publish on each sector page, costed throughout at 25p per kWh for electricity, 7p per kWh for gas and around £365 a year in standing charges. They are typical, estimated ranges from published UK benchmarks, not quotes.
| Business type (typical, estimated) | Electricity a year | Gas a year | Annual bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cake makers and patisseries | 12,000 to 45,000 kWh | 4,000 to 25,000 kWh | £3,600 to £13,100 |
| Coffee roasters | 15,000 to 60,000 kWh | 20,000 to 110,000 kWh | £5,500 to £23,100 |
| Craft and high street bakeries | 25,000 to 70,000 kWh | 20,000 to 75,000 kWh | £8,000 to £23,100 |
| Craft distilleries and cideries | 25,000 to 90,000 kWh | 60,000 to 220,000 kWh | £10,800 to £38,300 |
| Small food manufacturers and co-packers | 35,000 to 140,000 kWh | 30,000 to 180,000 kWh | £11,200 to £48,000 |
| Microbreweries and taprooms | 35,000 to 110,000 kWh | 55,000 to 160,000 kWh | £13,000 to £39,000 |
| Wholesale and production bakeries | 90,000 to 260,000 kWh | 110,000 to 320,000 kWh | £30,600 to £87,800 |
Check the arithmetic. A high street bakery at the top of its band uses 70,000 kWh of electricity and 75,000 kWh of gas. At 25p and 7p that is £17,500 plus £5,250, and with about £365 of standing charges you get roughly £23,100. Your own rates will differ, which is exactly why the contract matters more than the benchmark.
The four contract traps that cost this sector most
1. Out of contract and deemed rates
When a business energy contract ends, the supply does not stop. You are moved onto deemed or out of contract rates, and in 2025 those sat around 50 per cent above negotiated fixed rates across the major business suppliers. Ofgem's own market work found microbusinesses are the least likely group to have ever switched, so a lot of production sites have been sitting there for a year or more.
Put numbers on it. A mid-sized producer using 60,000 kWh of electricity and 90,000 kWh of gas pays about £15,000 plus £6,300 on units, so £21,300 before standing charges. A 50 per cent premium on that is roughly £10,650 a year, for the same bread, beer or coffee. The one piece of good news is that deemed contracts are not a trap you are locked into: Ofgem requires suppliers to let you terminate a deemed contract on a maximum of 30 days notice with no termination fee.
2. The rollover you never saw
The other failure mode is the opposite. Instead of dropping onto deemed rates you are quietly rolled into a fresh fixed term at a price nobody negotiated, and now you genuinely are locked in. Most business suppliers will let you agree new rates up to 12 months ahead of your end date, so the fix is to know the date and act early rather than in the last week.
3. Being priced as a shop, a cafe or a bar
This is the trap specific to producers. A brewery with a taproom gets priced as a bar, which prices the weekend well and the glycol baseload badly. A roastery with a counter gets priced as a coffee shop, when the roaster and afterburner have nothing in common with a cafe load. Ask your supplier for a half hourly or smart meter data download and look at the 3am to 7am block. If there is a real night load there, it should not be priced like a nine to five shop.
4. Standing charges, multiple meters and half hourly metering
Standing charges run at around £365 a year per fuel per meter. A producer with an electricity supply, a gas supply and a second unit on the estate is paying that three or four times over before a single kWh, and it rarely gets looked at. Larger production bakeries and co-packers also tend to be half hourly metered, which adds capacity charges to the mix. Agreed supply capacity is very often set higher than the site has ever drawn, and you pay for the headroom every month.
Seven things that actually cut the kWh
- Batch the bake, the boil and the roast. Preheat is a fixed cost. Bringing a deck oven, a copper or a roaster drum up from cold costs the same whether you run two batches or twelve, so back to back production cuts fuel per kilo more than any control setting change.
- Insulate the hot side. Hot liquor tanks, coppers, still bodies and swan necks, steam and condensate lines, jacketed vessels. Uninsulated surface area is a continuous loss that never shows up as a fault. Audit steam traps annually while you are at it, because one failed trap on a bakery boiler can waste thousands of pounds of gas a year on its own.
- Check seals and set points. Oven doors, prover doors, cold room seals, strip curtains and auto-closers. Then look at the numbers on the dial. Holding a retarder or a glycol loop two degrees colder than the process needs runs the compressor harder every night of the year for no gain.
- Cover the display and clean the coils. Night blinds on open fronted chilled cabinets cut compressor run time for the fifteen hours a day you are shut. Dust on a condenser coil quietly adds ten to twenty per cent to compressor run time.
- Recover the heat you are already paying for. Oven flues into boiler feedwater, wort cooling into the next brew's hot liquor, still condenser heat into the next charge, roaster afterburner heat into incoming air. Craft production rejects a lot of low grade heat that small sites simply throw away.
- Fix compressed air leaks. A small food unit typically wastes twenty to thirty per cent of its compressed air, and that is pure electricity out of the wall across the whole packing hall.
- Stagger your start ups. Bring decks, boiler and blast chilling up in sequence rather than all at shift change. Flattening the morning peak can change your capacity charge on a half hourly site as well as improving how your profile is priced.
Keep it in proportion, though. On a site using 100,000 kWh of electricity, a penny per kWh is £1,000 a year, and the gap between a rolled over rate and a negotiated one is usually several pence. Efficiency work is real money. The contract is faster.
When to switch, and what actually happens
The right moment is three to twelve months before your contract ends, or today if it has already ended. Businesses that switch with us save 40 per cent on average, typically 30 to 50 per cent, and more if you are on out of contract or deemed rates. Our best single bill to date came down 72 per cent. Those are estimates based on typical UK business energy spend and published market rates, and the 40% average is the business's own figure, not a published dataset, and you can read how we estimate before you take our word for any of it.
The process itself is short:
- Upload one recent bill at our free quote page. It carries your meter numbers, unit rates, standing charge and contract end date, which is everything needed to price the site properly.
- We compare over 20 business suppliers and price electricity and gas separately, because the best price for each is often with a different supplier. You see real prices before you commit to anything, and if nothing beats what you hold we say so.
- Nothing is dug up or switched off. Same wires, same pipes, same meter, no interruption to supply. Only the name on the contract changes.
- Free to you. We are paid by the supplier, not by you.
If you want the sector detail first, the food and drink production energy guide breaks the figures down by business type.
Questions we get asked
Should an early morning bake put me on a day and night tariff?
Sometimes. If you have a half hourly or smart meter and a genuine 3am to 7am load, a day and night rate or a properly shaped contract can price that block much better than a flat rate. It only works if the meter can record it, so the first step is checking what meter you actually have rather than assuming.
My taproom or shop shares a meter with production. Does that matter?
Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons producers overpay. Two very different load shapes on one supply get priced as whichever one the supplier recognised first, and it is rarely the production side. Ask to have the site re-profiled as production with retail attached, not the other way round.
My unit is on an industrial estate and the landlord handles the bill. Can I still switch?
It depends on whether the supply is in your name. If you hold the meter and the contract, you can switch. If the landlord re-bills you through a service charge or a sub-meter, usually you cannot. Check the meter number on your bill anyway, because a lot of small units on estates hold their own supply without realising it.
All figures here are estimates from published UK benchmarks, costed at 25p per kWh for electricity, 7p per kWh for gas and around £365 a year in standing charges. They are not quotes. See how we estimate.