This paper presents the concept of adaptive predictive controller (APC) designed to improve energy efficiency of heating liquid content in batch process vessel with heating jacket. In practice, such processes are controlled by conventional on–off controllers that ensure fast heatup but it fails to prevent from significant overheating resulting in undesired energy lost and potential content damage. Suggested concept is based on simplified heating model used for prediction of maximal temperature of the vessel content. It ensures time-optimal heatup without overheating and adaptability ensuring robustness to uncertainty on heating dynamics and content rheology. Practical implementation in Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) in the form of a general purpose library function blocks is also presented. It is validated by virtual commissioning based on realistic distributed parameter model of batch heating process with additive measurement noise. Results show robustness and superiority of APC and its ability for significant improvement in heating energy efficiency.