Increasing Energy Efficiency in the Food and Beverage Industry: A Human-Centered Design Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Hi, Find below comments:

• There are many typo error found in these lines: 173,178, 188, 221, 237, 245, 302, 326, 333, 373, 381, 401.
• The introduction started with INDUCE without preparing the reader to know what is the background of such program, why, when it was established and what its main target. 
• In line 301 needs to explain "gross domestic product of what ?"
• In table 1, since the topic of this paper focus on energy efficiency it is beneficial from the reader perspective to provide data about kg of co2 emission per kg of fuel consumption in each type of industry sector. 
• Table 1, 2, and 3 are not mention any where in the text
• Figure 6, needs title for x and y axis
• Figure 7, 250 employees or more group, cannot be seen in the pie chart may you need to show it on the figure.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

An innovative methodology to motivate and empower the key actors of companies by creating an energy culture that increases energy efficiency is presented in the paper. The methodology is based on the human-centered design approach and allows companies to adopt different models adapted to each situation in order to acquire an energy efficiency culture that enables actions to be carried out in companies more effectively and with long-term impact. The subject is worth investigating but the paper cannot be published without a major revision addressing the following issues.

The Results and Discussion sections are scarce, presenting few data related to the proposed methodology and results from other project (Odyssee-Mure) or Eurostat. I would have expected to find more details about how was applied and implemented the proposed methodology in the pilot companies, to demonstrate its flexibility and so on.

The Conclusions section must include the main findings of this study and not statistical data from EUROSTAT.

There are several missing reference source (“see Error! Reference source not found”) that must be included in the manuscript.

L175: the quality of Fig.1 must be enhanced in terms of readability, also, some vertical lines are not visible;

L177: “first phase (Phase I)” is redundant, please reconsider it;

L210: “The second phase (Phase II)” is redundant, please reconsider it;

L219: Fig. 3 must be referred and shortly described in the manuscript;

L309: please include the period (probably one year) for the presented values of the energy consumption;

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

It is not clear why the authors invoke confidentiality issues as long as the companies involved and details regarding the implementation of the project in these companies are available on the project website.

However, to be considered for publishing, in my opinion, the manuscript must be further improved.

Authors declare in the abstract that this paper describe also the implementation and validation of the proposed methodology in 11 pilot companies but these cannot be found in the paper. Therefore, this part of the abstract must be accordingly revised.

More details must be given related to the values presented in Table 2: what the investments consisted of, what type of energy was saved (thermal, electrical), what was the range of the energy costs in the considered companies etc.

The proposed methodology mostly rely on the cultural and behavioral analysis in the field of energy efficiency. More insights about these barriers must be presented to enhance the contribution of this paper.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Please note that our intention is to do everything possible to make this communication publishable, but we have certain limitations that prevent us from providing certain information.

Thank you for your useful comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.