Applebee's Case Study - Restaurant Technologies | Automated Cooking Oil Management

COOKING OIL CASE STUDY

Apple American Group, the largest Applebee’s franchisee with 441 Applebee’s Grill and Bar restaurants, was looking to improve their oil handling process to decrease operating costs and reduce the risk of employee injuries associated with oil handling. What they found with Total Oil Management was so much more.

Employee Safety and Restaurant Cleanliness

Apple American Group is the second largest franchisee of any restaurant concept in the world. It has remained dedicated to making every Applebee’s location a true neighborhood experience, responsive to the needs of each guest, employee, and community. As part of this dedication, Apple American Group strives to ensure that its food quality, operational efficiency measures, safety, cleanliness, and sustainability efforts are top-notch. 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.

Total Oil Management was the solution to eliminating both the oil handling task, and the potential risk to employees. Employees easily and safely add fresh oil and dispose of used oil — no lugging, no spills.

Goodbye to Grease Shuttles

Grease shuttles and disposal tools that help employees transfer hot oil to waste bins are difficult to keep clean, require space for storage, and can invite unwanted pests. The need for storage and handling of new and used oil in jugs and boxes can also impact a restaurant’s cleanliness, both indoors and out. With Total Oil Management, Apple American Group was able to eliminate grease shuttles completely, eliminating a safety hazard from the kitchen, and decrease waste by 4,420 pounds per month by not utilizing plastic jugs with cardboard packaging.

“We’re saving time because we don’t have to drag shuttles around,” says Jeff Lingel. “But cleanliness has also improved; our floors stay cleaner and safer, the back dock is cleaner without the grease bin and the equipment itself is cleaner. The removal of the grease shuttle was a big win for us.”

“The fryer filtration monitoring system has helped us to do a better job monitoring the maintenance of our oil,” says Lingel. “Using the oil test kits that Restaurant Technologies supplies and the dashboard, we are able to extend the life of the oil and improve the quality of our fried foods.”

A More Sustainable Neighborhood + Bar

Cutting out oil packaging waste is important for restaurant sustainability efforts. By decreasing the amount of plastic and other materials that go into landfills, restaurants like Applebee’s are showing how they can be more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Restaurant Technologies also recycles many of its customers’ used cooking oil into biodiesel and feedstock, directly supporting corporate sustainability initiatives.

Better Filtration Practices for Improved Food Quality

The fry stations at restaurants like Applebee’s, which serve a diverse range of menu items, have become more complex as customer tastes expand. This means that oil is used more often, for more types of fried foods. It must be monitored and filtered regularly to maintain a high quality of food taste, no matter what’s being fried. Despite this need, restaurant managers often find that employees skip or shortchange parts of the oil filtration process.

To maintain accurate filtration practices, Lingel’s team uses the Total Oil Management web-based portal to provide Applebee’s 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 Applebee’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.

Oil Management Impacts Every Aspect of the Restaurant

Lingel also points out that Restaurant Technologies’ commitment to ongoing technology research and development continues to push Apple American to look at its business and find ways to improve.