Maintenance in Food and Beverage Manufacturing at Arla Foods
Release Date: 05/18/2026
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Maintenance in Food and Beverage Manufacturing at Arla Foods
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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...
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Andy Mellor, Founder of Pragmatic Maintenance & Reliability, joins the Comparesoft Maintenance Podcast to break down what a successful condition monitoring strategy actually looks like, and why so many programmes fail to deliver, even when the right tools and data are in place. Drawing on over 20 years of hands-on experience across heavy industry, including eight years at British Steel and contract work at sites such as Anglesey Aluminium, Andy explains why culture, communication, and trust matter more than technology when it comes to turning predictive data into maintenance action. In...
info_outlineJosh 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/