Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg© 2018 Bloomberg Finance LP
During my brief stint as a student at the Culinary Institute of America, one of our Chef Instructors told us a story.
He was trying to instill the idea that we needed to be safe and careful in the kitchen, so he launched into a horrific tale about the time a student had spilled a pot of hot oil down her leg and had to be rushed to the hospital. We paid attention after that.
Oil burns are one of the leading causes of injury in restaurants. But oil is difficult to deal with at nearly every stage. You need to pay attention to when it needs to be changed, how hot it is, make sure not to spill it all over the floor. Spilled oil is the number one cause of slips and falls in restaurants... In short, it's a dangerous hassle.
It turns out that there's another way.
See, back in the 90s, a group of Co2 tank manufacturers was trying to break into a new market. They were working with restaurants, servicing soda machines, and started to wonder what else they could sell to those customers, or as Restaurant Technologies CEO Jeff Kiesel puts it, "They were looking around, thinking, 'What's liquid that can be moved?"' The solution they hit upon has been quietly revolutionizing the health and safety of hundreds of foodservice workers nationwide for years.
Restaurant Technologies Inc. (RTI) makes a series of tanks with a filter that you can hook up to a fryer. The aptly named Total Oil Management System completely eliminates any handling of oil. Everything from ordering to delivery is handled by RTI, and when the oil is ready to be thrown out, the company comes out and sends it off to be converted to biodiesel. Its website is full of testimonials from overwhelmed, grateful customers like Tony De Salvo of Bar Louie, whose, "old system was so messy, physically strenuous and even dangerous, that employees were cutting corners to avoid doing the work. Instead of filtering the oil, employees would add fresh oil to bad oil, overuse the oil and then dump and replace large quantities."
This product eliminates all that, creating what Jeff Kiesel describes as "a safer, cleaner working environment... The morale is much better. According to our customers, having an automated oil system versus manually handling the fresh and waste oil makes [restaurant jobs] much more enjoyable."
Restaurant Technologies logoRestaurant Technologies
With automation, someone is always losing a job. The question, according to Robin Zebrowski, a professor of Cognitive Science at my alma mater Beloit College, is who. In this case, the only people losing business work at the hospital. They're probably just fine with that.
But now, RTI is taking away business from even more emergency services professionals with its AutoMist system, a new product that hooks up to any restaurant hood and cleans it automatically. When a restaurant doesn't get its hood cleaned often enough - something that happens frequently since it's so time-intensive - it can lead to catastrophic fires, fires so intense that at a certain point there's nothing the fire department can do to help.
Kiesel says that while back, "An inventor came to us... This person had one restaurant that burnt down. They basically designed the system over a couple of years and then brought it to us." That was in the late 2000s, and RTI turned him down. But when he came back with an improved system in 2015, they had to say yes. The AutoMist is apparently so well-designed that Deputy Chief David DeWall of the Minneapolis Fire Department believes it, "elevates fire prevention to a level not seen in the fire service... The design of this system is able to provide a level of assurance for inspection services that reach beyond a routine code enforcement inspection.”
Kiesel was subdued both times I talked to him, but everyone I've told about his company has been wildly excited about the idea. Automation that makes people's jobs easier, better, and safer should be exciting. Safety isn't sexy, but maybe it should be.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizzysaxe/2019/01/31/restaurant-technologies-products-are-boring-but-revolutionary/ 2019-01-31 21:55:00Z
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