Green Restaurant Tips - Managing Equipment For More Efficiency

Going green is a hot buzzword these days, and everyone, including the food service industry, is jumping on board the environmentally friendly bandwagon.
The great thing about going green in your restaurant is that you can cut costs and save yourself considerable money while improving customer loyalty and visibility at the same time. In a time when cutting costs might mean sinking or swimming, going green might be the thing that helps you stay afloat.
This series is intended to help you cut costs and improve your business' bottom line while making legitimate green restaurant claims to your customers. And you just might save the planet in the process.
How To Manage Equipment
The equipment in your restaurant or commercial kitchen uses thousands of dollars worth of energy every year. Running this equipment is essential to your business, but it can also be a drain on profits if not managed properly. Some tips to help you manage equipment:
Reduce idle times. Cooking equipment like broilers, steamers, ovens, holding cabinets, and fryers all take time to heat up for optimal use.
Because your kitchen staff is usually more concerned with food preparation times than energy efficiency, they tend to leave equipment running during downtimes to avoid being slowed down by heat up time.
Obviously, you also want to minimize food prep time, but striking a balance between time and energy use is easier than you might think.
Things like broilers and connectionless steamers don't take very long to heat up, so shutting them down during even short lulls can save you money. Ovens and fryers can be reduced to an idle temperature that uses less energy than constantly maintaining peak cooking temperature. Newer fryer models even offer an automatic idle temperature feature. And warming cabinets are often left on overnight, wasting energy.
Utilize efficient cooking strategies. Using energy hogs like salamanders or broilers is necessary to cook and serve a quality product.
But that doesn't mean you have to use the least efficient weapons in your cooking arsenal all the time. Evaluate how each menu item is prepared and devise strategies to employ the most efficient equipment in your kitchen as much as possible.
Steamers, convection ovens, griddles, and microwaves are more efficient than ranges, broilers, standard ovens, and salamanders, so if you can substitute one for the other without compromising the quality of your product, do so.
Here are some more tips on how to make sure your restaurant equipment is performing at maximum efficiency.
Perform regular equipment maintenance. Simple parts on cooking and refrigeration equipment break down or degrade over time from constant use, reducing energy efficiency and equipment performance.
Usually these parts are so easy to replace you can do it yourself:
Door gaskets. The constant opening and closing of oven, steamer, and refrigerator or freezer doors leads to wear and tear on the gasket that helps seal in heat or cold.
Replace these gaskets as they become worn to reduce leaks.
Thermostats. The thermostat on your freezer, refrigerator, or fryer can lose its calibration or wear out, meaning the machine isn't operating at optimal temperature.
Check thermostats regularly with a commercial thermometer and recalibrate or replace them as needed.
Check pilot lights and clean burners. Pilot lights are convenient but also represent a constant use of energy in your kitchen. Make sure they aren't using more energy than needed by checking them regularly.
If the flame is taller than a couple inches or yellow in color, adjust the flame until it's small and blue. Also clean oven and range burners regularly and replace burners that have worn out to maximize their efficiency.
Train kitchen staff. Implementing the tips above sounds good in theory, but unless you train your staff to think about energy efficiency, these strategies will remain just a theory.
Set idle time and shut down procedures for all your equipment to minimize their energy use. Train head staff to check for bad door gaskets and thermostats. Make sure full racks of dishes are going through the dishwasher instead of half full or mostly empty ones.
Most importantly, get your staff to understand why energy savings are important, and incentivize them to act efficiently.
Buy Energy Star rated restaurant equipment. Replace old equipment in your kitchen as quickly as possible. When shopping for new equipment, look for Energy Star ratings. Most restaurant equipment has annual energy usage statistics. Use this information to compare units and purchase the most efficient one.
No matter what, new equipment is going to be more efficient and perform better than old equipment. Often the annual energy savings from new equipment will recoup the cost of purchasing it within a few years.
Also check for rebates from your local, state, or federal government for purchasing energy efficient equipment.
Carefully calculate capacity. One of the most common mistakes restaurant or commercial kitchen managers make when purchasing new equipment is buying too big.
Ice machines, refrigerators or freezers, and dishwashers are big energy users and are the most common units where this mistake is made. Of course, buying too small is just as bad, and that's why it's important to accurately calculate your production needs.
Start by analyzing peak demand. Once you know how many people or how many meals you serve per hour at peak demand times, you can better analyze what size equipment you need.
However, you should also take into account future growth.
Most restaurant equipment, if properly maintained, should last 5 - 10 years. In that time your business should grow as well, meaning peak demand 5 years from now is going to be more than peak demand right now.
In general, overestimate equipment capacity by 10% - 20% to make sure it can meet your needs over the entire lifetime of the unit.