How restaurant energy efficiency can boost more than your bottom line

Succeeding as a restaurant franchisee means making a lot of tough, smart decisions. Your costs, from wholesale food to labor, are always inching (or jumping) up, but your menu prices need to stay low. As you look for ways to cut costs in a restaurant, you know that these changes can’t get in the way of what you need each of your restaurants to be: a great-looking, environmentally friendly dining experience for your customers. A clean, code-compliant facility that is ahead of the pack on ratings and inspections. A safe, state-of-the art workplace for your employees, and a stable, smooth-running, profitable business for you.

Restaurant Energy Efficiency

As a Fast Casual owner/operator, you’re probably already all-too-aware that restaurants use a lot more energy (up to 3 times more per square foot) than most commercial buildings. With volatile fuel costs, your energy bills are some of the most unpredictable parts of your budget. It’s no surprise that the push for restaurant energy efficiency has led to the development of a diverse array of ways to cut costs in a restaurant. Highly efficient Energy Star products have been a standard part of foodservice operations for years, and forward-thinking owners have led the industry’s early and increasing adoption of energy-saving technologies like LED lighting.

Energy Efficiency as a Service

Identifying and implementing the right energy-saving choices for your restaurant from among all the constantly-evolving options can obviously make a big difference to your bottom line. But this takes time that you might not be able to spare, and expertise that may be outside your skill set. Frankly, many owners find it overwhelming: one company installs LED lighting, another puts monitors on your refrigeration units, a third offers to upgrade your HVAC system– you have to contract them all individually, and who even knows if they all work (let alone work together)?

A growing number of restaurateurs are discovering the unique energy management services of Budderfly, a company that combines multiple efficiency upgrades and monitoring technologies, installing and managing them at no charge to the customer. This Energy Efficiency as a Service model has been growing rapidly in recent years, as it provides a risk-free path to savings and simplifies a lot of the confusion and risk involved in becoming more energy efficient.

Budderfly installs proprietary technology that allows monitoring and control of usage throughout your restaurants, without interfering with your operations. This includes smart cycling equipment activity to avoid heavy electrical load and shifting as much power use as possible to low-rate time periods.

As part of their services, they also improve your facilities with upgrades to energy efficient equipment like premium LED lighting, superior HVAC, heat reclamation systems, and ventilation controls. 

Saving More than Energy

Budderfly’s Energy Efficiency as a Service solution creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, allowing even more ways to cut costs in a restaurant than simply reducing your utility spending. With monitoring at multiple points of consumption (rather than just at the meter outside the building) you get a clear picture of what is running and when, and whether it is functioning properly. This is particularly important for HVAC systems and freezer and refrigeration units, as detailed data can proactively alert you to functional interruptions or irregularities and provide auditable information to help improve and maintain your health and safety code ratings, while also potentially reducing insurance liability. Complete monitoring and control also help to reduce food spoilage and waste. This increased level of operational awareness can even help you see and head off problems with equipment functionality, extending the life of these expensive units and protecting your investment in them.

Simple Power

In addition to offering franchisees operational improvements and ways to cut costs in a restaurant, the energy management services Budderfly provides also bring another important advantage: simplicity. It’s nearly impossible to make clear, informed business decisions about energy usage and ways to save when you have multiple restaurant locations. Aside from differences in size, functionality, and equipment between each location, they may be served by different utilities, each with its own confusing and inconsistent billing and invoicing system.

By contrast, Budderfly gives you a single, simple bill each month that combines and clearly explains all your energy usage, with comprehensive consumption information on each piece of equipment. The time and aggravation you save can be almost as valuable as the energy savings and data you receive. And your energy decisions for any new locations you may acquire or build are also simplified, since you’re going into them with this superior, high-efficiency approach.

Making the Change

It’s clear that achieving energy efficiency means more than ways to cut costs in a restaurant: it can open a whole new level of simplicity and success.

Budderfly is a specialist in restaurant facilities. Your risk-free partnership with them means that Budderfly guarantees savings, provides industry-defining controls and monitoring, performs extensive upgrades and ongoing component maintenance, and pays for it all with their money, not yours. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s not! It’s how Budderfly is already doing business in thousands of restaurants, as well as a number of community colleges and schools. Learn more about the One Change that Changes Everything at budderfly.com.