Restaurant Technologies, the industry leading commercial kitchen automation company, boasts a diverse group of customers across multiple industries including grocery stores such as Krogers, Albertsons and Hy-Vee, among others.
In a recent customer survey, the grocery store segment listed safety, food quality and sustainability as three of the top reasons to work with Restaurant Technologies and here’s why:
Safety
The traditional oil handling process is manual, time-consuming and dirty. It creates an environment where employees are at risk for oil burns, slip and falls, back strains, or other injuries.
Restaurant Technologies’ Total Oil Management (TOM) solution is an end-to-end automated bulk cooking oil management system that delivers, monitors, filters and recycles cooking oil. TOM can help prevent injuries that typically come with oil management such as burns and slip and fall injuries, by eliminating one of the dirtiest jobs in the kitchen and creating a safer deli for employees.
A safer deli, and the elimination of cooking oil management for employees, has also proven to increase employee satisfaction and retention.
Food quality
Picking up a prepared meal at grocery stores has increased in popularity over the years as more people are looking for quick and high-quality food without having to add another stop on their to-do list. This means cooking oil use in grocery delis has increased as they’ve diversified and added items to their menu. Cooking oil must be monitored and filtered regularly to maintain high quality and consistent food taste, no matter what’s being fried. It can also be difficult to know when the right time to filter is since it typically depends on volume instead of a set schedule. Despite this, managers often find that employees skip or shortchange parts of the oil filtration process.
To maintain accurate filtration practices, the TOM portal, an online customer portal, provides managers and decision makers with real-time, store-level visibility into oil usage statistics, oil quality, filtration data, deliveries and more. Data for individual or multiple locations is delivered via a dashboard, which is accessible by managers anywhere they have internet access.
The customer’s filtration policies and SOPs are programmed into the system, allowing it to track events and flag instances outside of the SOPs. With the portal and the alerts, managers know right away when procedures are being met or missed. If a procedure isn’t followed, it creates training opportunities for staff, improves adherence to standards and improves overall business practices.
Sustainability
Restaurant Technologies recycles 100% of the used cooking oil it collects from the delis inside grocery stores. The company broke its own sustainability record by recycling and converting more than 314 million pounds of used cooking oil (UCO) into renewable diesel or biodiesel in 2023, breaking the record set in 2022 by 25 million pounds helping create a cleaner, more livable planet.
With the support of renewable energy partners such as Chevron Renewable Energy Group, Restaurant Technologies converts the UCO into renewable diesel or biodiesel. By eliminating packaging and converting UCO into renewable fuel, the company helped save about 26.7 million pounds of trash, more than 8 million cubic feet of landfill space, reduced petroleum diesel usage by more than 40 million gallons and helped avoid more than 1 billion pounds in CO2e emissions. The company now helps over 40,000 of its customers become more socially responsible by reaching new sustainability heights.
The TOM portal also ensures that customers are maximizing the life of their oil. It shows when oil is delivered, how much is used and the best time to filter which means none of it goes to waste.
