Red Fish Grill improves kitchen staff satisfaction with automation and data

Chefs at an award-winning French Quarter restaurant are now working in a safer, cleaner and more efficient kitchen.

That’s because Haley Bittermann, corporate executive chef for Ralph Brennan’s Red Fish Grill, found a more sustainable and efficient way to manage its cooking oil. Bittermann installed an automated oil management system from Restaurant Technologies, Inc. (RTI) in the restaurant, which is known for its seafood specialties. Just 60 days after implementing the RTI system, oil usage at Red Fish Grill decreased 48 percent.

“The results we have seen are tremendous,” said Bittermann, “and now the entirety of managing frying oil – from buying and storing, to filtering and cleaning – is very easy to manage.”

Before installing the automated system, Red Fish Grill was using an outdated, manual process to handle its cooking oil. Restaurant protocol required staff to filter oil twice a day, which required kitchen staff to shut down the fryers. Because busy chefs couldn’t afford the downtime needed, the staff threw out unfiltered oil to safeguard food quality – while unintentionally throwing out “money” by tossing the oil instead of filtering it.

                   
Bittermann noted, “Minimizing the space required for oil storage and reducing the amount of time spent manually filling, filtering and disposing of frying oil helps us be so much more efficient.”

Employees now filter oil according to the restaurant’s filtration protocols, and the general manager and chef are sent alerts in real-time when employees do not meet filtration standard operating practices. The general manager remotely monitors employee compliance though an online portal, which gives managers an easy-to-use dashboard for visibility into the restaurant’s oil performance and filtration trends, as well as delivery and disposal history and compliance to SOPs. This helps them improve training, correct employee behavior and identify areas to improve efficiencies.

On top of oil use and cost savings, employee safety and satisfaction has improved. Bittermann credits the system with a reduction in workers’ compensation claims, and providing peace of mind by not having to worry about employees slipping, falling or burning themselves while handling hot oil. Employees are happy because they don’t have to haul grease anymore.

“The cooks would kill me if I took RTI out at this point,” said Bittermann. "In fact, the automated oil management has been so successful at Red Fish Grill that we are installing it in a California restaurant."