Inside the Factories of the Future
Meet the British manufacturers proving that innovation and sustainability are no longer competing priorities
In this article, we share learnings from ten manufacturers who are at the forefront of innovation. We also show how Good Energy customers, including Teemill, myenergi, GW Martin, Deceuninck and Riverford are putting their renewable principles into practice to lower margins and boost productivity.
When you imagine a “Factory of the Future”, what does it look like? Maybe it has robotic employees stocking shelves and packing boxes. Perhaps it’s filled with gleaming glass and steel, where engineers watch the gentle buzz of production from a control room. Everything is automated and electrified, from the forklifts to the coffee machine.
It’s a sleek picture, but is that really the aspiration?
Automation is undoubtedly part of manufacturing’s story – but it’s not the full picture. Some of the most forward-thinking manufacturers know that real progress is as much about embracing their communities, using circular economies and cultivating unique supply chain collaborations. These manufacturers are taking back control over their waste, productivity and resilience.
Here’s how they’re doing it, and what we can learn from them.
Breaking the cycle: the circular economy
Most factories begin with raw materials, potentially having travelled thousands of miles to get there. But at Harrison Spinks, it begins in the fields just down the road.
This Leeds bedmaker grows most of its mattress materials on a 280-acre Yorkshire farm just 18 miles from the factory, where they cultivate hemp, flax and rear sheep for wool. They process all their materials, weave the fabric and even draw the mattress springs all under the same roof.
All the crops are also grown without herbicides or pesticides, absorbing more carbon than is emitted while they grow. As for waste, whatever doesn’t make it into a mattress becomes animal bedding, biofuel or building materials.
Not every manufacturer has the luxury of acres of farmland and raw materials on their doorstep, but the opportunities are there for those that seek them.
Clothing manufacturer Teemill has designed its entire production line with circularity in mind. Rather than manufacturing in bulk and hoping items sell, each product is only printed in the seconds after it is ordered – meaning no overstock, no guesswork, and no waste from unsold clothing. Industry-wide, around 40% of clothing is never worn, so this alone is a significant departure from the norm.
At the end of a garment’s life, the loop closes. Every product has a QR code sewn into its wash-care label: scanning it generates a free return label, and sending it back earns the customer credit towards their next purchase. They break down the returned material and spin it into new fabric. The model has since been opened up so that tens of thousands of other brands can produce clothing through Teemill’s circular supply chain platform – meaning the impact scales well beyond one company.
Did you know, Teemill‘s factory on the Isle of Wight is powered by Good Energy’s hourly matched renewable energy supply? We provide them with granular data to support their decarbonisation journey and sustainability reporting.
The supply chain is the product
Every manufacturer faces the same dilemma: what to make and what to buy. Get it wrong and you could undermine quality or carry cost and complexity a specialist could handle better. Get it right, and your supply chain becomes a source of competitive advantage.
Take Brompton, the folding-bike maker that has stayed stubbornly, proudly in London. Around 2,000 bikes a week leave its Greenford factory, where steel frames are still brazed together by hand – a craft so specific that Brompton trains its own brazers for 18 months.
Chief executive Will Butler-Adams describes its tiered approach to supply chains: “The core, IP-rich work stays in-house. The next tier is kept in the UK wherever a supplier still exists, and only commodity parts are bought from abroad because, for some components, the British supply chain simply isn’t here any longer.”
When you control the process, you control the quality, the conditions and the carbon. Ownership isn’t the only way to do that. Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, owns no factories, yet takes responsibility for all of its supply chain emissions – nearly 99% of its annual total – financing energy efficiency upgrades for suppliers, and decarbonising factories it doesn’t own but can’t afford to ignore.
Some businesses take a different route, building their supply chain around what industries around them are wasting. Toast Ale recovers surplus bread from local bakeries and sandwich manufacturers, using it to replace a quarter of the barley in its brewing process. With 400,000 tonnes of bread wasted in the UK each year, it’s a reminder that another industry’s by-product can be your raw material – and that the most deliberate supply chains are built on exactly that kind of thinking.
Whether the answer is Brompton’s vertical integration, Patagonia’s deep accountability without ownership, or Toast Ale’s circular sourcing, the common thread is intentionality. The factories of the future aren’t just asking how to make products more efficiently – they’re asking who they make them with, and what that relationship stands for.
Employee ownership: when workers own the business
As integral as supply chains are, a striking thing that many manufacturers can embrace is giving back to the people that work there.
Riverford, the organic veg-box pioneer based in Devon, is a case in point. In 2018, founder Guy Singh-Watson handed the business to its staff rather than selling to outside investors – protecting Riverford’s values and ensuring its independence.
Today, with over 950 co-owners working across multiple sites, every employee can play a part in shaping the business. The people packing the boxes also share the profits and vote on how the company is run.
As well as an impressive solar array on their rooftop, Riverford power their site with renewable, hourly matched electricity from Good Energy.
It turns out that giving people a genuine stake changes how they show up to work. After Riverford made the switch, the results were striking. The company recorded its best year of sales growth in its history, with its managing director attributing that directly to a growing sense of unity and shared purpose – with motivation, ideas and ownership transforming everything from productivity to staff turnover.
Employee ownership as a model has grown by around 60% since 2010, and the Riverford story suggests that when people feel they truly own something, they take better care of it.
Working smarter with digitalisation and automation
So far, none of this looks much like the futuristic fantasy, but digitalisation does have a starring role – it’s just quieter, and smarter, than the daydream suggests.
A brilliant example is the Siemens‘ factory in Congleton, Cheshire, which builds the variable-speed drives and controls that regulate motors in other factories. Surrounded by houses with no room to physically expand, it has used digital twins, the industrial internet of things and a culture of lean, continuous improvement to increase its output. It now boasts one of the highest productivity rates per square meter among Siemens’ sites.
What makes this Siemens factory particularly interesting is what happened when it turned that same optimisation instinct onto its own energy use. A building-management system now flexes the site’s energy demand automatically to shave waste. What’s more, it sources its power directly from a local hydro plant, as well as from certified biogas. Thanks to these initiatives, the factory became carbon neutral eight years ahead of schedule, running largely independently from the grid and saving over £250,000 a year in the process – proving that sustainability initiatives can be as good for the bottom line as they are for the planet.
Renewable energy as a strategic investment
If there’s one financial pressure every manufacturer feels, it’s energy costs. But it’s also the cost that manufacturers can do most to bring under their own control. The most forward-looking businesses treat clean power not as a green gesture, but as a hedge against volatility. Using on-site solar generation, renewable electricity supply and increasingly sophisticated energy strategies, manufacturers are taking greater control of one of their largest operational costs.
Lincolnshire-based eco-tech manufacturer myenergi wanted the place where its products are built to reflect the values behind them.
In 2021 the company chose Good Energy to install a 63.7kWp solar array at its headquarters, then returned to add a larger 259kWp array on its factory rooftop in 2023 – together generating around 50% of the site’s total energy needs in summer months.
As Emma Brigginshaw, Head of Sustainability and Ethics at myenergi, puts it: “When our customers and partners come to visit our products where they are made, our solar panels make a big impression and help us demonstrate our sustainability commitments. As well as helping us to decarbonise our operations and enhance our reputation, we are getting a return on investment very quickly which is fabulous.”
The same logic applies at any scale. Precision manufacturer GW Martin started cautiously in 2015 with a modest 50kW solar installation, scaled it in phases to 240kWp once it proved its worth, and now shaves around £75,000 a year from its energy bill.
Read GW Martin’s advice to other manufacturers considering solar
Window-and-door maker Deceuninck went bigger still with an enormous 1MW solar installation, fitted on a live manufacturing site with only around four hours of downtime in total.
The result for all three businesses? Greater control: over costs, carbon and volatile bills.
The factory of the future is already here
So picture that factory of the future again. What unites these manufacturers isn’t a single technology. It’s a mindset: that resilience and environmental responsibility have stopped being conflicting priorities and have started being the same investment. They’ve taken control of their waste, their supply chains and their energy, and in doing so they’ve built businesses better equipped to weather what the next decade throws at them.
The factory of the future isn’t coming. For the manufacturers who’ve already decided what kind of business they want to be, it’s here. The only question left is whether yours will be one of them?
Good Energy in partnership with British manufacturers
Manufacturers today face a complex balancing act. Rising energy costs, growing sustainability expectations, supply chain pressures and net zero commitments all demand action, but action that delivers commercial value.
At Good Energy, we help businesses turn energy from a fixed overhead into a strategic asset through commercial solar, renewable electricity supply and smarter energy management, giving them greater control over costs, resilience and carbon emissions.
Through partnerships with manufacturers including Teemill, Riverford, myenergi, GW Martin, Deceuninck, Bridec and bigHead, as well as our engagement with organisations such as the Food and Drink Federation and events like Smart Manufacturing Week, we’re strengthening our ties with the sector and playing a pivotal role in its transition to cleaner, more affordable and more resilient energy.
Our goal is simple: we’re here to help British manufacturers build stronger businesses for the future.
