Out of that total energy spend, let''s focus on the two big energy burners of an average restaurant business:
These two factors already account for about a total of 34% of your average energy consumption!
Consider that alongside your other essential energy-consuming systems:
So overall, your power consumption pie chart would look like this:
It''s no wonder that electricity use (and corresponding bills) continue to rise. Unfortunately, as the amount of electricity operators use rises, so do the challenges of running foodservice businesses.
However, new technology provides many solutions to optimize power consumption and, in turn, reduce your overall operating costs. This type of technology is known as an Energy Management System (EMS).
EMS and their providers promote energy efficiency by combining—
All of which work in tandem to reduce a restaurant''s overall energy use.
While all that makes EMSs sound like they have a ''premium price tag'', you don''t have to get them from an expensive third-party provider.
You can achieve incredible feats of energy-saving optimizations with just simple adjustments—all you need now is to know where to look.
Optimizing your restaurant for energy efficiency is a significant undertaking. Due to the complexity of the interconnected systems found within restaurants—electricity management requires a detailed multi-pronged approach.
Because of this fact, simply purchasing a single piece of software will not produce the desired results. On the other hand, investing in an EMS provider or consultancy may not be practical for all restaurants.
While many EMS, in general, are proven effective, they may require high upfront costs and no timetable for receiving a return on investment.
If you are considering investing in a third-party Energy Management System, you''ll need to ask yourself the following questions:
Before purchasing an EMS, identify which teams or individual staff will take charge of the alerting system. For smaller teams, consider monitoring only the aspects of equipment that are most important to your customer experiences, such as refrigeration and HVAC.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Ensure that the EMS system you''re eyeing offers a customized approach, providing solutions tailored to your restaurant. As much as possible, value the options to add and subtract hardware components as needed for your operation.
Ensure that you can integrate the EMS into other buildings within your restaurant chain. There should also be a unified dashboard that makes it easy for you to track and analyze individual data points across the various locations.
You must be able to financially accommodate the upfront costs of implementing an EMS and achieve ROI within a quantifiable period. In the food service industry, this should be 10% every quarter consistently.
Non-technical personnel should be able to understand and use the system without much help from in-house maintenance personnel. As rank-and-file staff use the equipment daily, their comprehension should help facilitate proper and efficient use in standard operations.
With all these considerations in place, it''s time to tackle the next big question
Before understanding how to optimize your restaurant equipment for energy efficiency, let''s go back to that energy consumption pie chart from earlier.
Generally, energy usage can be split between front and back-of-house use cases, with back-of-house utilizing power more heavily. Some front-of-house use cases include ambient lighting and HVAC systems, while the back of the house relies heavily on ventilation, cooking, and refrigeration.
Therefore, to globally reduce energy usage, you''d need to utilize metering, maintenance, and other optimization techniques for all of the high energy-consuming equipment in your buildings.
Temperature monitoring systems are a crucial part of your EMS since energy usage from refrigeration can fluctuate. At a point in their lifespan, refrigeration units would suddenly demand the most energy usage of any single system in a restaurant. This is partly due to the plethora of interconnected components that allow them to operate.
Because refrigerators consume vast amounts of power in the long term, it''s unsurprising that their components wear down over time. At some point, your refrigeration systems may become less effective at holding a static temperature, causing increased energy consumption to compensate and operate correctly.
One major sign of increased energy consumption in refrigerators is the inability to hold the temperature threshold set on the machine''s thermostat.
However, remote monitoring systems would constantly monitor your refrigeration equipment to spot these discrepancies. Thus, alerting you early to conduct much-needed maintenance that can drastically improve their overall energy efficiency and savings.
With the current price and scarcity of energy, the best way to yield financial savings would be to use practical and evidence-based efforts to reduce your overall energy consumption.
According to this downloadable PDF from the Department of Energy:
Further savings can accumulate unintentionally due to some of the measures introduced through Energy Management Systems and associated control systems.
The average restaurant loses 28-35% of its income annually from wasted inventory, often caused by subpar cold storage. By monitoring the temperature within your cold storage with remote temperature monitoring systems, you can take active steps to prevent your inventory from spoiling.
The same is true for equipment maintenance. Often, restaurants would delay necessary fixes to their cold storage equipment due to the inconvenience of equipment downtime and the price of repairs.
However, if you neglect to maintain your equipment for an extended period of time, it''ll start consuming excess electricity—and ultimately fail.
Spoilage prevention and energy conservation also have other positive impacts on your business, aside from financial. Energy management systems and their associated components can also help your business''s sustainability initiatives. Because saving energy reduces the number of carbon-based energy resources your restaurant uses, EMSs provide cost savings that make your energy system sustainable.
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