What TEA Navigator can do for Food Manufacturing

Every technical decision has an economic consequence. TEA Navigator helps you understand both—before the investment is made.

TEA Navigator supports early-stage product and manufacturing decisions, where many alternatives are being considered and detailed business cases do not yet exist.

It links technical choices—such as formulation, process design, equipment selection, yields, energy consumption, cycle time, cooling, and packaging—directly to economic outcomes including COGS and profitability. This is especially valuable during R&D and process development, when finance may not yet have built a detailed financial model.

Questions answered

• Can the proposed line achieve the target operating margin at 200 t/year?
• What are the largest contributors to cost and operating profit?
• Which unit operations are most labor-intensive or energy-intensive?
• At what production volume does profitability improve?
• How sensitive is profitability to packaging-material cost?
• How would increased ingredient costs affect operating margin?
• Would alternative cooking equipment improve the economics?
• How long is required to cool an intermediate candy slab or finished candy?

Economic analysis

Build the process

Create the block flow diagram for ingredient handling, dissolving, cooking, cooling, forming, final cooling, packaging, and finished product.

Review the P&L

TEA Navigator calculates revenue, ingredients, packaging, labor, utilities, overhead, depreciation, operating profit, and operating margin for the planned production volume.

Drill down into operating costs

Review labor, utilities, waste, facilities, and other expenses by unit operation to identify the most significant cost contributors.

Test packaging-cost sensitivity

Evaluate how changes in primary wrap, bags, cartons, and shipping cases affect operating margin at different production volumes.

Compare equipment alternatives

Compare installed investment, labor, energy, maintenance, capacity, and fully loaded operating cost for alternative cooking systems.

Computer modeling — the “T” in TEA

The same project connects economic analysis to physics-based cooling models for both intermediate product and finished candy.

Candy slab cooling

Predict one-dimensional temperature profiles as a candy slab moves through a multi-zone cooling tunnel.

Evaluate cooling time, slab thickness, air temperature, and heat-transfer conditions at the top and bottom surfaces.

Finished candy cooling

Predict three-dimensional temperature profiles within a finished candy during cooling.

Evaluate center, average, and surface temperature and determine the time required to reach a safe handling or packaging condition.

What this example demonstrates

• One project connects formulation, process design, P&L, cost drill-down, sensitivity analysis, equipment comparison, and cooling models.
• Ingredients, packaging, labor, utilities, waste, overhead, and depreciation can be evaluated together.
• Production volume and packaging costs strongly influence operating margin.
• Equipment alternatives can be compared using both investment and operating-cost criteria.
• Cooling performance can be evaluated using both one-dimensional and three-dimensional heat-transfer models.