Restaurants
Serving complex, fast-paced businesses
Restauranteurs pour their passion into creating special places for people to gather and enjoy a good meal. It’s an idea that seems so simple. Yet, below the surface restaurants may be one of the most complicated small business models to manage. As a contractor, you can’t solve it all, but you do offer a range of solutions that contribute to their success. Once you start demonstrating those connections, your expertise can make HVAC equipment and services immediately relevant (and much more interesting) to restaurant owners and managers.

Let’s take a look at some of today’s most pressing restaurant challenges.

The restaurant industry is the nation’s second largest private sector employer.¹  Employment and immigration laws affecting restaurant staffing and compensation always seem to be changing. Attracting and retaining employees who are wholly devoted to customer service can make or break a business.

Food safety requires constant diligence. Managers need to know that refrigerators and freezers are maintaining food-safe temperatures all the time to prevent food from going to waste—and landing in landfills. Did you know that the food we waste accounts for 8% of our greenhouse gas emissions?²

That leads us to the growing pressures of running a sustainable restaurant. Operating the business in a way that respects the planet is practically a customer expectation. Along with reducing food waste, things like local sourcing, eco-friendly packaging and energy efficiency combine to create a meaningful sustainability profile.

Restaurants often run on thin financial margins. Many are still recovering from months of lost business during mandatory pandemic shutdowns. That leaves little in the budget to hire outside expertise. Culinary skills may be the soul of the business, but they’ll also need skills in branding, business operations and facility management to thrive.

These are some of the solutions you might keep in mind when working with your restaurant customers.

Leveraging connectivity for profitability
Creating a “smart restaurant” can have different meanings, depending on whether you’re working with a single-location independent restaurant or nationwide franchise. No matter the scope or scale, restaurants of all sizes can use technology to automate comfort and optimize energy efficiency. Thanks to smart thermostats, intuitive controls and user-friendly building automation systems, even non-technical system users can now run buildings (almost) like a pro.

Connectivity has two important benefits: more reliable comfort and greater cost efficiency. Keeping employees and patrons comfortable has always been essential to the hospitality business. Restaurants make money by providing a welcoming and comfortable environment. Now it’s just easier to do. Mobile apps enabling remote monitoring and management provide peace of mind that conditions inside the building are always on-brand. It may even give managers a little more flexibility and peace of mind to step away from the business. Remote monitoring systems can connect to refrigerators and freezers, too. Alarms may be automated to alert when temperatures rise above food safety levels due to a door left open or equipment failure.

Restaurants are extremely energy-intensive. It’s estimated that HVAC accounts for anywhere from 25% to 40% of the overall energy use in a quick-service restaurant.³ Adding a building automation system to implement proper control strategies and scheduling can reduce the amount of energy that’s consumed by up to 40%.⁴  For budget-stretched businesses, that can be a big bump-up for the bottom line.