Maintenance in Food and Beverage Manufacturing at Arla Foods

Josh Clarke, Senior Maintenance and Engineering Manager at Arla Foods, joins the Comparesoft CMMS Podcast to share what good maintenance really looks like in food and beverage manufacturing. Josh runs maintenance at Arla's Aylesbury site, one of the world's biggest dairy factories, where his team handles 500 to 700 work orders a week across processing, production, and a purpose-built energy centre that generates the plant's own electricity, steam, and refrigeration. He has spent his career building maintenance programmes across dairy, bakery, and meat processing, including a 90% downtime reduction during his time as Engineering Manager at Délifrance. In this episode, Josh talks about: What a day looks like running maintenance at a 24/7, 365 dairy site How his team prioritises and moves 500 to 700 work orders a week How food and beverage sites maintain uptime without a shutdown window How he tripled preventative maintenance output by doing one job a day Why plants revert to spreadsheets even when they have a CMMS in place How he cut downtime by 90% at Délifrance, starting from a stabilise-first mindset The three things that separate well-run food and beverage sites from the rest 🔗 Listen and read more: Comparesoft: 👉 https://comparesoft.com/cmms-software/manufacturing/food-beverage/