How Idaho Milk Products enriched data with Nectar

"Managing environmental data across our operations was becoming increasingly complex. We needed a system that could not only collect the data but actually make sense of it," said Jeremy Pike, Sustainability Platform Leader at Idaho Milk Products. As one of the leading dairy processors in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho Milk Products operates energy-intensive facilities where electricity, natural gas, and water consumption are critical both to operational costs and sustainability commitments.

The challenge: making sense of vast environmental data

Idaho Milk Products faced a common problem among manufacturers — utility bills arrived in inconsistent formats from multiple providers, each with different line-item structures and billing conventions. The sustainability team spent significant time not just collecting bills but manually interpreting them: classifying charges, identifying demand peaks, and separating consumption data from fees and taxes. This manual effort slowed down reporting and made it difficult to extract the actionable insights needed to drive efficiency improvements.

Nectar's automated data enrichment

Nectar's platform went beyond simple data collection for Idaho Milk Products. The automation system ingested utility bills and enriched the line-item data automatically — correctly classifying charges into categories like energy consumption, demand, distribution, and taxes. This enrichment layer transformed raw billing data into structured, analysis-ready information without manual intervention. The team could immediately see consumption trends, rate impacts, and cost drivers across their facilities without spending hours on spreadsheet manipulation.

Results: streamlined reporting and a $177k grant

With Nectar handling data collection and enrichment, Idaho Milk Products dramatically reduced the manual workload on its sustainability team. Reporting cycles that previously took days were compressed into hours. The clean, structured data also proved valuable beyond internal reporting — in 2023, Idaho Milk Products successfully won a $177,000 grant from Idaho Power, supported by the accurate and well-organized energy data that Nectar helped them maintain. The grant funded further energy efficiency projects at their facilities, creating a virtuous cycle of better data leading to better outcomes.

For Idaho Milk Products, the value of automation was not just in saving time — it was in unlocking insights and opportunities that were previously buried in unstructured billing data. Learn more about how Nectar parses granular utility cost data to deliver the line-item detail that made this possible.