Company Manages Restaurants’ Used Cooking Oil

Company Manages Restaurants’ Used Cooking Oil Grease is the word in the fast-food business. French fries, chicken, fish -- many of our favorite foods are fried in it, with the average fast-food restaurant going through 30 to 100 gallons of cooking oil a day. Disposing of used cooking oil has been the bane of many a restaurant worker: wrestling with tubs of hot oil and emptying them into a smelly trash bin, often with burns and spills along the way. A new technique for what it calls “bulk cooking oil management services” has come up, promoted by Restaurant Technologies Inc.( RTI), an Eagan-based company. It’s a seemingly simple solution: a fleet of tankers that pump fresh oil through hoses to 200-gallon storage tanks inside the restaurant, then reverse the process to pump out used oil. “All restaurants struggle with oil disposal,” said Mark Godward, president of Strategic Restaurant Engineering, a Miami-based consulting firm. Employees tend to avoid the messy job, which can affect food quality if a kitchen is cooking with old oil. RTI is owned by a consortium of venture capitalists, with major shareholders including Parthenon Capital of Boston and ABS Capital Partners of Baltimore. RTI’s new CEO Jeffrey Kiesel, who joined the company in July after a long career with GE Capital Corp, said his goal is to transform cooking oil “from a commodity to a bundled service with data attached.” RTI has about 90 tanker trucks and 30 depots where it stores fresh and used oil, selling the used oil for animal feedstock and biodiesel fuel. It installs storage tanks and pumps in each restaurant and monitors the oil with wireless technology, allowing for just-in-time deliveries. Clients also get detailed reports concerning their oil use and cost. Each restaurant’s installation cost around $5,000 and each tanker truck going for somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000. Restaurant will get a cleaner store while saving on waste, spillage and medical costs. Kiesel claims the average store can save between $750 and $2,000 a year just in reduced medical and safety claims from grease slips and burns. Excerpt from article by John Reinan, Star Tribune Contact author at jreinan@startribune.com.