Jack in the Box Case Study - Restaurant Technologies | Automated Cooking Oil Management

COOKING OIL CASE STUDY

Restaurant owners understand the importance of keeping their kitchens safe and clean, but safety and cleanliness aren’t the kinds of things they want to think about all day. Successful restaurant owners have bigger fish to fry, so to speak. TJ Ahmed is the owner of Spring Valley Jack, LLC, a multi-brand franchisee company currently operating five Jack in the Box restaurants in Texas.

Before TJ was introduced to Restaurant Technologies, his restaurants were dealing with messy kitchens, injured employees, and inconsistent food quality. With Restaurant Technologies, he discovered the hassle-free way to keep his kitchens safe and clean and his food consistently delicious.

Cleaner and Safer Kitchens

With traditional cooking oil handling, frying oil is poured manually from heavy jugs into hot fryers and used cooking oil is lugged to the back of the restaurant where it’s discarded in collection bins outside. It’s messy, dangerous, and time consuming.

Now, with Total Oil Management, fresh cooking oil is added and used cooking oil is disposed of with the touch of a button. No more spills. No more lugging oil. No more unsightly drums of grease outside. TJ’s kitchens are clean, safe, and efficient. “It saves us a lot of headaches,” TJ said.

The Convenience of Bulk Cooking Oil Delivery

Total Oil Management is a closed-loop system that takes care of the entire cooking oil process for restaurants — from fresh oil delivery to filtration and monitoring to used cooking oil pick-up and recycling. When fresh cooking oil is delivered in bulk automatically, it’s just one less thing to think about.

“We had employees who got burned by grease and issues with grease getting all over the place. There’d be oil on the floor, and it would take forever to clean it. But it was more than that. It was the drums of grease outside and the people who came to pick them up. It was a hassle.”

“Anybody who operates a restaurant wants convenience for their employees. Total Oil Management and AutoMist are great. If I were to build another restaurant, I’d put them in automatically. Wouldn’t think twice about it. It’s a no-brainer.”

Empowered Employees Make Better Food

When the quality of fried food is inconsistent or the food coming out of the fryer tastes “off,” it’s often due to improper oil filtration. Now that Total Oil Management has made filtering easy, TJ encourages his managers and employees to filter the oil as frequently as they see fit. The result? Oil that’s always fresh and food that consistently tastes great.

No More Strangers in the Kitchen at Night

Cleaning hoods and flues with third-party hood cleaners is disruptive. And no restaurant owner loves the idea of strangers in their kitchen when the restaurant is closed at night. AutoMist® eliminates the need for third-party hood cleanings by stopping grease buildup before it starts. With AutoMist, TJ’s hoods and flues are clean and safe all day, every day. Strangers are no longer invited into his kitchens at night.

“At first, I was a little skeptical of how it worked, but we’re very happy with it. We don’t have to shut the store down and we don’t have to deal with some of the people who were coming in the middle of the night. Sometimes they would leave a mess and sometimes they would disconnect things. It’s always an issue in the restaurant industry. Getting it done totally automatically means it’s just one more thing off our plate that we don’t have to worry about.”

A Side Order of Sustainability

Restaurant owners don’t always have time to think about the environmental impact of their restaurants. With Total Oil Management, they don’t have to think about it at all. Just like everything else with Total Oil Management, the sustainability is automatic. Each year, Jack in the Box restaurants that use Total Oil Management save 557 oil jugs — that’s 855 pounds of trash — from going into landfills, and 12,675 pounds of their used cooking oil are recycled into eco-friendly biodiesel and green diesel.