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Transforming Restaurant Operations with Smart Energy Management: Insights from Powerhouse Dynamics

• Erika Rivas

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In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Jeremy Julian hosts Jay Fiske, President of Powerhouse Dynamics. They discuss the impact of smart energy management on restaurant operations, with insights on how IoT and AI technology are revolutionizing areas from HVAC systems to fryers. Jay explains how these technologies reduce costs, waste, and maintenance issues. He dives into the specifics of HVAC and refrigeration management, emphasizing the importance of proactive maintenance and data-driven decision-making. The discussion also covers cooking equipment, particularly fryers, and how data can optimize oil use and quality. Jay shares the importance of automating repetitive tasks to allow restaurant staff to focus on more value-added activities. Additionally, the potential for AI in predictive maintenance and energy demand management is highlighted. The episode concludes with a call to restaurant operators to consider IoT solutions for efficiency and cost savings.

00:00 Power House Dynamics

00:14 Introduction and Welcome

01:24 Meet Jay Fiske: Background and Career Journey

03:10 Powerhouse Dynamics: From Energy Sensors to Food Service Solutions

05:49 Revolutionizing Restaurant Operations with IoT

07:12 Deep Dive: HVAC and Refrigeration Management

11:01 Automation and Efficiency in Food Service

13:33 Real-Time Data and Predictive Maintenance

17:07 Retrofitting Existing Equipment with IoT

19:26 Balancing Oil Usage with Data

19:56 Importance of Filtration in Fryers

20:36 Sophisticated Metrics in Frying Operations

22:28 Monitoring Water Usage

24:48 Energy Management in Food Service

37:00 The Role of AI in Energy Management

38:53 Conclusion and Contact Information

Speaker 2:

This is the Restaurant Technology Guides podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.

Jeremy Julian:

everyone. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Today's guest is Jay Fisk, the president of Powerhouse Dynamics. We dive into smart energy management and how it's changing restaurant operations. Jay shares some really great insights as how technology is really impacting every area of facilities management from H-V-A-C-E to. Refrigeration to fryers, to coffee machines. He shares how iot and AI are truly helping cut costs, reduce waste, and automate the stuff that used to make operators crazy. If you're tired of chasing maintenance issues and wasting dollars, this episode is a must watch. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer of CBS North Star. We wrote the North Star Point of Sale solution for multi-units. Please check us out. At CBS northstar.com and now onto our episode. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us, as I like to say each and every time. And my family likes to make fun of me over the dinner table'cause I can hear the, recordings outside of my office. I say this every time, but I know that, I don't take for granted that you guys hang out with us each week. Thank you for tuning in and thank you for, the feedback that you guys give me on social and, when I see you in person. Today is a cool episode because, I'm gonna let Jay talk a little bit about his background. But, Jay and his organization have been doing some really unique things that I think are super bleeding edge as it relates to tech, and I think there's a lot of opportunities for restaurants and really all food service operators to be better. But Jay, before we jump into kind of what. What you get a chance to do. Tell me a little bit about your background. Who is Jay? Where did you come from? You know what? What's your role where you're at now?

Jay Fiske:

Sure. yeah. I'm Jay Fiske. I'm the President of Powerhouse Dynamics. We are the makers of the Open Kitchen, internet of things platform for multi-site food service operators. my background, I grew up in upstate New York, on, on the shores of Lake Ontario. and pretty much the state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast for my whole life. But I've always been fascinated with technology. I've always despised waste and loved deficiency. and these are concepts I've worked on for pretty much the entirety of my career. and so I, I've mo most of my career has also been focused around, The development introduction of new technology, enabled products and services. And it's been various startups. I spent a brief stint, as a partner in a very, boutique venture capital, firm making, early stage investments in renewable energy, technologies. but hard to believe, 14 years ago, I joined a very young, very small. I was the fourth employee, so I technically. Not my, I wasn't a founder, but it still feels like my baby. powerhouse dynamics. And I joined, this fledgling startup, leading business development. And, it's been a really, amazing journey, building the company, from essentially the very beginning. To getting acquired in 2019 and continuing and having the really great fortune of having a chance to lead the company for the past three and a half years, as we were part of our parent company, Middleby. But, we started out, I dunno if the sort of the history of the company is interesting that we started out making, energy sensors for homeowners so they could see where the electricity was flowing inside their house and. make improvements. The software would look at this and say, you don't need to run your pool pump for 24 hours a day. You can run it for 12 hours and still have a very healthy environment. Or you could yell at your kids for leaving their bedroom lights on when they went to school. all kinds of things like that. And it was interesting and cool, but not a lot of energy nerds out there like me to make for a terribly interesting market. But, we saw an opportunity to pivot the business when I joined into, An area that feels the the pain of energy cost much more acutely. And that's food service.'cause we just started looking at, who really feels the pain around energy acutely and in smaller facilities.'cause we had originally started out for, buildings the size of homes like maybe you and I have. and if you look at the math, it's restaurants, right? compared to a house, it's probably 20 times more energy intense in terms of kilowatt hours per square foot. If you look at other commercial, facilities, it's three to five times. So we said, ah, that's really interesting. And we don't see any technology in the space helping these organizations manage their equipment, manage one of their bigger spends on utilities. And deliver that, that, that sort of bottom line savings. So really pivoted the company into that space and continued to evolve and develop the platform to what it is today, which is broadly speaking, helping multi-site food service operators manage their critical infrastructure, whether it's HVAC automation and diagnostics, automating lighting and signage to tapping into the controls, and extracting data from a commercial fryer. And managing your oil and your fryer operations better. pushing recipe updates to rapid cook ovens, getting visibility into, customer facing, super automatic coffee bean to cup coffee machines. And so there's just, back to the theme of who I am and what I do and what motivates me. My why is I despise waste. I love efficiency. And there's just, when we took the company and focused on this, Very resource intensive industry called food service and applying some clever software in the cloud and getting data, impactful data to that software. the results are pretty compelling and it's pretty exciting to be part of this. And we are, this is still a relatively new thing for the food service industry, so I like that. I like. going where no one has gone before and building new things, and also evangelizing and saying, whether it's my platform or somebody else's, there's just people. Please take, look at this. There's just so much value out there, waiting to be captured. let us help you.

Jeremy Julian:

Yeah. No, and I think, I mean it's interesting when you guys had approached the show because again, selfishly I get a chance to sit on this side of the mic and learn, and I love to learn new things. And, maybe there's a, maybe there's a. A, a small piece of your brain that needs to be, evaluated by science, restaurants and new tech all in the same world. there's a very small percentage of people that can figure this out because it's a crazy world out there innovating and creating a space. You share, Jay, this internet of things in general and I guess I'd love to kinda start with. I dunno. I guess let's start with refrigeration.'cause Refrigeration's a big piece. I think HVAC refrigeration are the two biggest areas where there's opportunities. But let's start with kind of freezers and refrigerators. What is traditional prior to powerhouse dynamics? What is the ways that they manage these devices? Is it just. They do temp checks and they figure it out. Is that, walk us through, give us a day in the life of those restaurant owners, those restaurant managers that are out there today prior to implementing your solution, and what changes after we, after we implement this new tech that you're talking about.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, Great question. And just to, I, I know your audience is fairly tech savvy, but. If I can start, just explain, so it sometimes these frothy terms, right? Get people a little bit. internet of Things is a very simple concept. It's literally a device that has data that is directly connected to the cloud and sending that data to the cloud, right? So it's giving, and that opens up all kinds of possibilities about what you can do to drive efficiency. So if you think about things like HVAC and refrigeration in, a typical restaurant today, you might have a programmable thermostat. to control the rooftop unit that's conditioning the space. In the summertime, it's providing air conditioning. In the winter it's providing heating. and same thing for your walk-ins or regions. there's a essentially another little thermostat in there that's saying this region needs to be at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, or the walk-in freezer needs to be at minus 10. and these devices are measuring the temperature locally and saying, oh, it's a little bit too warm. I'm gonna fire up the compressor. I'm gonna make cold air again. Whether you're. Providing, air conditioned air for keeping your customers and your staff happy. Or providing a nice cold environment to keep, the bugs and all the bad stuff outta your food. and the way that staff historically has managed those devices is on the refrigeration side a couple times a day, you walk around, you're exposed to, you're supposed to

Jeremy Julian:

Yeah. Whether they do or not is a

Jay Fiske:

right? Supposed to with a piece of paper and a pen, and you're write down the temperature and the time and who you are, and you sign. Yes, this is true. And but we all know food service operations. it is a really, tough industry. really tough job. There's a billion other higher priority things that people have to worry at. My chef just quit. Or a customer's complaining that food's not good or

Jeremy Julian:

the last 27 times the refrigerator was the same exact temperature. Why do I need to go check it a

Jay Fiske:

I forgot this morning, but you know what? It's probably fine. I'm just gonna write down 40 degrees and get on with my day. That's called pencil whipping, right? It happens all the time and people know that, right? So the historically that's been, it's labor intensive, it's manual, it's air prone, whatever. you lose the paper. What? You can't read your handwriting. You forget to do it. You make up the numbers. All of this stuff, we're dealing with people, right? And just people, it's just sometimes

Jeremy Julian:

are people and they're typically the least trained and the youngest. Youngest in the, in our industry. Right?

Jay Fiske:

and it's a similar story around HVAC that, if I'm comfortable, I don't think about it, right? Because I have a billion of other things that are more important. And so what happens is a brand new restaurant, I'm gonna put that thermostat in, okay? I'm gonna program it. during occupied hours I'm at 72, and in the off hours when I'm closed, I'll let that drift back to 78, maybe 80. And in the winter I'm gonna, I'm gonna set it to 68 and maybe let it drift back to 55 and the off hours. So it's great. what happens? Super hot day. Someone says, I'm working hard. I'm, washing dishes, running around, serving meals, busing, busting tables. I'm gonna put it to 70. I'm gonna press hold. That's much more comfortable. I'm gonna get on with my life. guess what? Nine months later it's still at 70 hold, right? And so every single evening it's blasting the air conditioning at 2:00 AM whether or not there's someone in the location. That's very common, right? Because again, it's one of these things like it's all that we're talking about, all that stuff that just It's supposed to work well to allow you to focus on the other things in having a successful food service operation. And if you're comfortable, you're not gonna even think about managing that HVAC unit, but you are literally just lighting stacks of cash on fire by not letting that system operate effectively. So condition the space when people are there, let it coast when they're not right. and that's, historically have the thermostat. If you've got it programmed, wonderful, you're ahead of, 90% of the rest of the industry. Mostly they're, even if they're programmable, they're not programmed. but you're just not gonna think about it. You're not gonna worry about it. You're just like, oh, energy's always gonna be three to 5% of my p and l. I can't really do anything about it. I'm gonna move on and worry about getting more folks in the front door.

Jeremy Julian:

where does life go as they engage with you guys, just specifically on these two areas, HVAC and kind of refrigeration. how do you guys help put these iot devices in to really change not just the behavior, but the reporting and all of those kind of things?'cause I'm excited because there's so few people that are, you talk about the percentage of people that even have a programmable thermostat then that the program is right and then where things go and how big of a change it can make. It's awesome.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, it's really fun. and you mentioned the word behavior, and that's a really important word because. We've learned sometimes the hard way, changing behavior is really hard, and I know that's obvious, right? when you have

Jeremy Julian:

back to people.

Jay Fiske:

we're going back to people. And so a big sort of, epiphany many years ago is changing behavior is hard. We've gotta automate, right? If we really want to have a compelling solution, we have to automate. So you don't have to worry about the fridge, you don't have to worry about programming your hvac, you're gonna be comfortable. The food's gonna be safe when there's a problem. It'll let you know. but you're also not wastefully, blasting air conditioning in the middle of the night. you're optimizing the use of that equipment and you're optimizing the use of the, of the fridge. And by the way, I just saved you maybe between all the refrigeration units in your facility. Maybe I saved you and your staff, an hour of non-value added administrative work every day. Because now someone doesn't have to go around or they're not well, they're supposed to go around with that piece of paper and writing things down and initialing it and then filing it away. just to prove when the health services inspector shows up, hey, someone complained or they got de deli belly last Tuesday, show me your logs. And you know that task is now off of the shoulders. It's all automated and online, and you can focus on things that humans are good at, right? Being hospitable, Let the machines just record the data.'cause like you said, most of the time it's gonna be the same. It's a very boring job, right? So let people do the more interesting things.

Jeremy Julian:

So in, in that case, once you guys are in there, is it constantly sending data to the cloud? Is it once an hour? help me understand. and then really what's the flip side of that? and I'll even just share a personal experience. we had a refrigerator problem. Enter my home just this week. and we lost some food because the refrigerator got too warm. It wasn't so warm that it was, that it was, but it was, I dunno, probably 45 degrees and it should have been 33 or 38 or whatever the temperature was supposed to be. We got a couple of dings, we unplugged it, plugged it back in. We thought it was fine. Ultimately it got fixed yesterday. But, with that it would've been fantastic. And again, not a commercial refrigerator, not tens of thousands of dollars worth of food, but in my circumstance, I had to throw away probably$50 worth of food because it's spoiled, because it got too hot. I'd love to understand what happens and what are the things that this IOT device can do to help drive some of the behavioral changes that might need to be changed.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah. Yeah. And I should say, as an aside, as a family member myself. It's not just necessarily about the 50 bucks, if you're, my nose is not terribly well calibrated, so you didn't feed your family bad food,

Jeremy Julian:

Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

Jay Fiske:

so yeah, no, so there's different platforms out there that, that behave in different ways. Our platform, pushes data to the cloud once a minute. So it's pretty, it's, we could, it's essentially real

Jeremy Julian:

Trail time.

Jay Fiske:

and that's for a couple reasons, because when you have that level of granularity, patterns begin, you can see some patterns that could be important, leading indicators as opposed to lagging indicators. so for example, if I'm, if we're looking at the, both the power consumption of the compressor, that's controlling a walk-in freezer and the temperature of the box, right? The temperature of the box. That's a lagging indicator to a problem. Something has failed and now that freezer's at, 45 degrees, blah, right? Bad, bad. Thousands of dollars. You probably have to throw it away, file an insurance claim, all that headache. If you had seen, the power consumption in real time, you maybe you would see it was short cycling, it was running continuously, or it failed, right? and, it fails. There's a lot of thermal mass inside that box. So it's gonna take a little time for the temperature to drift to the point where it's. Dangerous, right? there's the ability to get out ahead of problems. go buy a bunch of bags of ice. Call your buddy next door. Can I borrow some space in your, you all the things, restaurant operators are pretty, pretty scrappy

Jeremy Julian:

They're pretty resilient.

Jay Fiske:

very resilient, right? very resourceful. if you can get notified of the problem before it really turns into a multi-thousand dollar headache, then they're going to act and act on that. So that's really the key thing is providing information. as soon as it's, clear that there's a problem with the system and not after the fact, and you gotta throw things away.

Jeremy Julian:

Yeah, so I just, I'll throw another personal anecdote. When I was working restaurants, one of our side work pieces was always to make sure that the walk-in was closed at the end of our shift. Do you see some of these same kind of things where the door might not be closed on the walk-in the door, might not be walk, is that, are those circumstances that you guys can help alert on as well? Because again, back to non-value added, non-human, people would have to walk, Hey, is everything closed up? Is everything locked? it just turns into this thing where you can automate it. It. Again, you've got humans and they're in the loop and it's gonna be a challenge.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, for sure. I mean that it's, it is very common to say there's an alert. Your walk in cooler has been at 55 degrees for 30 minutes. Oh. The door's also been open for 30 minutes. Oh, someone didn't wanna keep opening closing'cause they're doing inventory, right? They're restocking the shelves. hey, you could call. He said, please just close the door. You're causing an unsafe environment, et cetera, et cetera. but you've also just avoided a truck roll, right? you didn't have to pay 500 bucks for a technician to go out and close the door. It's someone just not wanting to deal with opening and closing doors constantly while they move inventory back and forth from their truck. there's things like that where, yeah, again, just a little bit of data. If you have the state of the door. The temperature of the box and the power consumption profile. That, and just those three data points with a little bit of clever software can give you a lot of insights about what's going on. Or, if there was some issue, maybe the door is propped open, but the software can see, the temperature's recovering at a decent rate. Again, call off the alarms. You don't need to roll a truck. So it's,

Jeremy Julian:

but alert somebody so that training gets better for next week when they're doing inventory or whatnot.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, exactly. And then the same goes on the air conditioning side. There have been cases, we've had some pretty hot weeks here this summer. Someone will say, it's really hot in here. I think I need to roll a truck. And you can log in and say, actually. your system is running full blast. It's providing as cold air as it possibly can provide. I'm really sorry. it's undersized, it's unusually hot and you've avoided it. I, it can't make you have more cold air until you buy a bigger, larger capacity unit and put it on your roof. But at least I've saved you a couple hundred bucks in, in rolling a truck for something that's not broken.

Jeremy Julian:

Yeah, no. So Jay, for those listeners out here that are like, oh, I need something like this, does it require a complete rip and replace of their walk-in? Does it require, it sounds like you guys are able to put this stuff in line into existing equipment. Is that a, is that true? And if so, what does the remediation look like to get some of this kind of stuff in?

Jay Fiske:

and I'd say like anyone who's looking at IOT in food service space, It typically helps, and commonly we'll start focused on one specific area and refrigeration temperature tracking is a perfect example, right? and in, 99% of the time we're retrofitting existing locations. And my company and others, there's various and sundry other bits of hardware out there, whether they're hardwired or, they're powered, but wireless or they're battery powered in wireless, depending on. the state of the facility, drop ceilings, hard ceilings, all these kind of things. You learn about. there's different tools and different sort of types of hardware available to make the retrofit fairly simple. So no, does not require a new, walkin or reach in. It's literally, it can be as simple as like popping in, a sensor with two AA batteries and, getting it on the cloud. And then you're off, off to the races and the batteries, go for a couple years and you swap out the batteries and keep going.

Jeremy Julian:

I love it. so flipping around you, you, during kind of your, explanation of what you guys do, you talked about some of the cooking equipment. I'd love for you to dig in a little bit to what are some of the things that you can figure out on the cooking side. You talked about frying. We've had, different frying oil companies on the. On the show talking about the quality of the oil and how the quality of the oil and the temperature of the oil can change the, the profile of the food. I'd love for you to talk through both power consumption and kind of just in general how all of that works and what you guys are doing in that, in that area.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah. No, it's again, the mentioned frying. it's, it really is fascinating. Like it's a, it's an expensive asset to purchase. It's an expensive asset to operate, and you think about that natural resource of cooking oil. it's thousands of dollars per month commonly spent on cooking oil. And if you look at cooking oil, it's just another resource that you wanna manage in your restaurant. You wanna manage oil, you wanna hit that right balance because, we've seen cases where someone's hanging onto their oil too long. and modern fryer will have a TPM total polar material sensors or oil quality sensors baked into it. If you have, and so getting that data does require a new fryer with these kinds of capabilities in it that can connect to the cloud, et cetera, et cetera. But when you have that data, that really does allow you to strike the right balance of, Hey, you really need to dispose the oil because it will adversely affect your customer experience and the quality of product. It's right. But on the other side, we've also seen operators who are using twice the volume of oil that they should be because. Bob shows up and every Tuesday morning when Bob shows up, he just, he dumps the oil and gets, you don't need to do that. the TPM is still totally fine. you can't necessarily go just by the color of the oil. let's let data guide you and, do things like, reinforce, filtering the oil, right? So modern, A full featured fryer will have auto filtration capabilities, and oftentimes the operators just press, skip. what's gonna happen? and they're maybe doing it for good. Maybe they're super busy or what have you, but you can't skip it too much because that's gonna degrade the life of the oil. And you can see that in the data, the oil quality goes down, you'll dispose more often. Your costs go up. It's a very expensive resource. And yeah, it's been fascinating to me. I've never been a, I'm not a fryer guy, right? I'm a tech guy. but we learn a lot through osmosis and working with our partner, fryer manufacturers and working with the operators who have, frying as core. to their operations and understanding what's important to them. And they're, they get, they're getting, there's some operators out there that are getting pretty darn sophisticated about looking at the metrics and really understanding benchmarking, how many cook cycles are we getting per filtration? How many cook cycles are we getting, per disposal? which, where are my outliers for our operators that are skipping filtration cycles too much? There's a training issue, right? Because, internet of Things is not just about making sure the equipment is performing well. Is it being used properly? And we know, again, it's one of the challenges in food service, 200% employee turnover. It's hard to make sure you've got folks there that always have the latest, greatest standard operating procedures and know what to do. A little bit of data will help to reinforce best practices and again, ensure you've got a high quality product coming out of your kitchen and not overspending, on your costs to get that.

Jeremy Julian:

And so your guys as devices or other people that you guys compete within the space are able to monitor all of this data within the environment and kinda set thresholds and set alerts and how people go solve that. That's amazing.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, it does require, so it does require a, a later generation friar that has a digital controller on it. And that digital control, of course, it's like a little computer that sits in there. They've already got the data, but historically it's been stranded to that asset, right? So what we're doing is we're getting that raw data from the controller, oil temperature over time. filtration cycles, run oil quality data, all that information that's relevant to operating this. Critical asset, getting it to the cloud and then turning that into useful actionable information. Again, seeing where your best practices are, which organizations, need more training, benchmarking and oil consum, all that kind of stuff so that data is available. So the key for us and other cloud software providers is like getting it to the cloud and then turning that into useful, actionable, and it has to be succinct. It's gotta be actual, because as we said, we're dealing with people, they're super busy. They need very clear and concise direction on using these assets.

Jeremy Julian:

I love it. Jay, another line of questioning is really around plumbing and water usage. Are you guys monitoring water? again, my parents had a leak problem in their home at one point. They put one of those alarms, and so every once in a while when a toilet would, be running, continuously running or whatever else. But it is, again, it's something that, that is a non-renewable resource that we're using too much of from time to time. Are you guys at that place as well? nothing in our notes, but I'd love to know. If it's not, where is it at and is it coming for those people to think about?

Jay Fiske:

I'll give you some perspective and then I'll put my plea out to the industry and to your listeners. So we have in the past, installed water meters tied to the cloud with some analytics and, saying, Hey, we can see that. The, the water consumption at 3M is way higher than it should be. There's a leak somewhere, right? Is a toilet leaking, a sink is dripping, whatever it is, right? So the, those technologies are out there and they exist. The challenge we found is, we can get, one of our trained technicians, a licensed electrician to go into your electrical distribution panel, pop a bunch of sensors in there really quickly, and you get this beautiful granular, Disaggregated view of energy consumption and all the, typically a large piece of equipment will have a dedicated circuit. So it's very easy for me to get granular data down to the equipment level on energy and for the software to therefore look at the patterns, draw some conclusions, make recommendations, et cetera. Water's tough, right? I can get the data from the water main. Yeah. But to disaggregate that, so here's my plea to your listeners, some clever engineer out there. I've seen people try. But if there's a way to put a sensor on a water line and then disaggregate that to say, oh, that signal is your, your kitchen sink running that signal is your dish machine. This is the unique signal from, your bathroom sink. That would be really powerful. and to help, because again. we've done a limited amount of water monitoring primarily because the cost to deploy, the meter to enable, access to that data and versus the value that, that you can deliver when you're looking at water consumption in aggregate, the math is

Jeremy Julian:

the math doesn't math quite yet.

Jay Fiske:

correct? Correct. The math is not pencil out quite as well as if I'm putting in, essentially we have is like nest on steroids for multi-site operators and fully automated. The energy savings just happen. That's easy, right? That payback is really simple.

Jeremy Julian:

so I'd love to dig a little bit more into that. That's where my next line of questioning what is the impact, Jay, you talked about yourself being an energy nerd earlier on, and I, and I'm super fascinated about the different things.'cause selfishly I love to, my house is all completely automated. I walk in, the lights, turn on,

Jay Fiske:

Right on.

Jeremy Julian:

lights turn off and my wife's every time it's, I'm out of town and it doesn't work. She's like, why is this stuff not working? I'm like, always happens. But, I'd love for you to talk. What is the impact? What is the financial impact? What is the operational impact? What is the business impact? And really, let's get, a little bit, I don't know, tree hugger. what is the environmental impact if you can do it properly across the board, because they are such large consumers of energy in the world.

Jay Fiske:

sure. Yeah. and, it's pretty straightforward. we, when we go in, if someone is approaching our internet of things. With a focus on energy management, we'll typically go in and deploy HVAC automation and diagnostics. It is the simplest, easiest way to automate and deliver savings to the bottom line without customers really having to lift a finger. And so typically, and this is a, it's a very good strategy for the multi-site operators, and we've got others who've been more public about their strategy here is to say, I'm gonna start my IO OT journey focused on energy management because it's very, it's essentially just math. So I'm gonna go on, I'm gonna deploy this asset and I'm going to measure the before energy consumption. I'm gonna measure the energy consumption after, and the difference is the savings. You can do the payback, or in some cases we can just do a pure subscription and the savings are greater than the subscription cost your cashflow positive on day one. So that's, again, typical is 10 to 20% reduction in energy consumption on average across, an enterprise. And so that's just, again, the elimination of wasteful consumption of energy through automation, straight drop through to the bottom line. It makes a meaningful impact on profitability.

Jeremy Julian:

And when you look at those operators, they're like, don't tell me how to run my store. I know how to do it better. I'd love, the scientific answer to that says consistency and all of that. again, I realize what our stance is. Your stance and my stance and, but I'm sure you guys run into that where operators are like, no. You don't know my store. I need it this way.

Jay Fiske:

I would say actually we say you're right. You know how to run your stores best. We just help you enforce that. I can guarantee you, you don't have a procedure that says blast the air conditioning at 3:00 AM. Could almost guarantee that's not in your SOP, it's not in your employee manual, right? So let's use software and connectivity, internet of things to help you enforce the way you know how to run your operations best. That's really it, right? And so there's a very simple economic, value case to that. It's helping to reinforce because every operator behaves a little bit differently. They have different rules. And so you want software to be able to accommodate that. And some folks, so for, here's a small example. some organizations will say, you know what? If it's uncomfortable, I want my store manager to have to call someone at a central office to make a change. more. That's pretty uncommon, right? More often than that. It's like I want to give my store staff agency to, someone says it's cold in here, to go over the thermostat and, make a tweak, address a comfort complaint, and then get on with their day, But not, change it by 10 degrees.

Jeremy Julian:

And leave it there and on hold for the next nine months.

Jay Fiske:

Because there's this sort of belief that, if I, the more I change the temperature, the harder that system's gonna work. And this time I really mean it. So it darn well better get more comfortable. Now it doesn't work that way. Once it's on Blas, it's on v Blas and it's just gonna you, so yeah. so there's ways to use the software to enforce, the ways the operators know. to best operate their business. And that's really all that we're doing. And there's that's very sim simple to measure, simple to see benefit of utility bill before utility bill after direct bottom line savings, payback, et cetera. And then there's the stuff about, for your facilities team. And oftentimes, our main users are on the facilities, right? That, and it is a really hard job. Commonly it's, one facilities manager for a hundred, 150 locations. They're literally spending all day, every day fighting fires. We can use data, to help direct them to say, here's your prioritized list of rooftop units that need some TLC

Jeremy Julian:

Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna go down that, that PM side to, to extend the life of that HVAC unit to extend the life of that refrigeration unit, right? Because proper cleaning, proper maintenance ends up keeping it that much longer. And you guys can tell from the data

Jay Fiske:

Absolutely we can absolutely, you can tell from the data of that. And by the way, how about we fix something before you have to pay time and a half to a technician?'cause they have to show up at 9:00 PM on a Friday when you're super busy, right? So there's the savings that can we reduce the amount you're spending on reactive maintenance and get stuff more into the planned, preventative maintenance, get out ahead of these expensive, reactive calls. there's def it's the easiest thing to measure is the impact in utility bills. But when you, once the facilities folks start seeing. What they can accomplish and the visibility that this remote access gets them. They want it, right? it's just we're trying to take a little bit of pain off of their shoulders and make their lives a little bit easier with a little bit more visibility, a little bit more, predictability and frankly, more data to make smart decisions and not just reacting to the store manager who's yelling the loudest at you.

Jeremy Julian:

No, and I love that. and again, I think that, everything is gonna be connected at some point. And I think even 10 years ago I was like, people are like, ah, these things are gonna, they, why would I need a, why would I need these things connected to the internet that are my refrigeration and the refrigerators work forever? And it's like the, all of these use cases that you've talked about truly change the game. And, I'm excited to, to see where that goes. Jay, you had asked me before we, we hit record, just this plea that says if they're not gonna use powerhouse like dynamics, like there are a lot of other people out there. Or is there just a couple of people like, it sounds like this is something that is here today. It's not this futuristic thing, at a minimum HVAC and Refrigeration. Are we at a place where, a hundred percent of restaurants by the year 2026 should have something helping? I, help me paint a picture.'cause I'm just not in this. I'm certain we're gonna get, there's gonna be 20, 30, 40%, maybe more of our listeners. You can be like, dude, you're right. I need to make that phone call. But I'd love for your, for you to share a little state of the industry and then where would you like to see it go.

Jay Fiske:

yeah, you used the word should. Of course they should,

Jeremy Julian:

huh. but it makes financial sense. It makes environmental sense. It makes operational sense. there's almost no reason why you shouldn't, other than you've got 27 other things to do and you think it's gonna be too hard to manage.

Jay Fiske:

Yeah. if it, so for us, when we think about when we're engaged with an enterprise, more often than not, it's just, we're competing for capital. and where does the enterprise prioritize this? This is, I hate to be so fatalistic about it, but it is, it's inevitable, right? This is because it just, because, the longer we do this, the simpler it becomes for the operators, the more efficient everything becomes. It's just easy. it, so it's already happening. I think, it's no longer. A small number of early adopters, right? This is becoming standard practice. It is the larger multi-side enterprises that are driving connectivity and internet of things, whether it's on the energy side, whether it's on, fryers, refrigeration, coffee machines. That's where you'll, that's where it is being driven today. we're in several, thousand plus location deployments now, for various change. And again, those are the ones who, because of the size and magnitude, you know, all these critical. Assets distributed all over the country. they want that visibility, but it'll, there's a long tail of the mid-size and then mom pops will eventually, have a lot of this capability. it's happening. It's happening now. it certainly won't be industry wide by the end of 2026. That would be pretty exciting. but yeah, in 10 years, I think so, it just. and look, we're not the only ones out there making an energy management solution. There's certainly other players out there. We've decided, however, to do a pretty, deep focus on the food service space. And so it's not just about the thermostats and lighting automation, it's also about the refrigeration and the fryers and the coffee machines and the shake machines and hot to lead cabinet, rabbit, cook ovens, all that stuff. So we've taken a slightly different angle than some other folks in the space have taken. there's other wifi thermostats out there, right? excuse me. But that's, a bit, we, we. Our, as I mentioned earlier, math led us to food service very pretty early on in our journey and we've learned a lot about the industry, what the operators, value their pain points, and so I think we've got a bit more of a tuned solution for this particular space. I'm quite excited about that.

Jeremy Julian:

I love that. I'm gonna ask one last quick question, just'cause this is something anecdotal, but I'd love your opinion on it. I had heard, when you walk into certain convenience stores or certain restaurants, they've got an open cooler versus a closed cooler versus having the. having just the plexi, plastic across, I'd love your opinion. There's an aesthetic aspect of it, and then there's a true energy management aspect of it. But I'd heard somewhere that those things consume two or three x more than what a standard refrigerator might with a door on it. And I'd love, I guess just help educate our listeners because you might aesthetically like that, but it might be costing you an extra 20 bucks a month to run this open refrigeration unit to be able to allow them to get. again, I walk into my local bagel place and they used to have it open and now they've got it behind a closed door. Clearly they changed for some reason to do that. I don't know, I dunno if the old one broke or what happened there, but I'd love just kinda your opinion on some of these things.'cause I think sometimes they design these in without this, in, in impact in mind and I just, I don't know, I guess educate our listeners,

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, look, it's a great point. as an energy nerd, I see the open cases. I'm like, oh gosh, but look, let's give credit where credit is due. These operators are not dumb. They're very smart, very savvy people. and there I am sure someone has done multiple, people have probably done the studies between how much friction there is in opening the door to get your selection versus just reaching it. So probably, I would imagine someone has done that trade up. I don't know the difference between how much revenue you can drive from an open display case versus one behind doors versus the extra cost on energy you spend to keep it open. So perhaps that calculus is changing. Perhaps, many years ago when these became popular, energy wasn't as expensive as it is today. I know that's the case, right? It's certainly not, it is certainly much more expensive today than it was, 20, 30 years ago, and that's continuing to go up and up. So at some point that math may change where it makes more sense to, put the door there and reduce energy consumption because you're now got that enclosed space.

Jeremy Julian:

Got you.

Jay Fiske:

I tend to, I want to work with the, the challenges as they are in front of me and just deal with reality and try and put, sensible solutions in, I wanna meet my customers where they are

Jeremy Julian:

Yeah. sorry for the curve ball. It was just

Jay Fiske:

yeah. no, it's all good. I, they do, yeah. and there's, there's clever things, like there's air curtains and I was a mechanical engineer by training, so there's things you can do to Minimize the impact so it's not just freely blowing out into the environment. But yeah, of course it's not a physically constrained space, and so your energy consumption to keep that product cool is gonna be a little higher.

Jeremy Julian:

I love it. Jay, what did we miss, if anything, on, on today's show, other than how do people get in touch with you and your team to learn more?

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, I would just say, when operators are considering, hey, I've heard a lot about internet things. I think that there's a lot of opportunity there to weather. It's reducing cost, protecting food, reducing administrative labor in my facilities. It may f feel a little overwhelming and I would say, I reach out, I'll be happy to do a discovery call. Most of our customers start pretty laser focused on one area, right? And say, let's just tackle energy first, or let's in hvac, or let's just tackle refrigeration. Or let's just, heck, let's just tackle your rapid cook ovens and get'em rid of thumb drives. We can do menu updates over the air.'cause you do'em, many times a year it costs you money. Let's start laser focused and then solve that problem. But work, we like to work collaboratively to say there's a roadmap to digitizing your operations to drive more efficiency and eliminate more waste, and have ultimately a more successful business. But start focused, right? It doesn't have to, you don't have to boil the ocean all at once. We can solve some very simple, very specific problems and then go from there.

Jeremy Julian:

Awesome. and again, I think for those multi-site operators, especially facilities teams that are just constantly gonna be what, playing Whack-a-mole, trying to figure this stuff out after it's broken, not preventatively. And so how do people get in touch? How do people learn more? How do people stay on the, on that train to be able to learn how can they, they solve these energy management challenges?

Jay Fiske:

Sure. You can, website open kitchen.com or you can email me directly, JA y@powerhousedynamics.com. Happy to, to chat with anyone who's curious to learn more.

Jeremy Julian:

Awesome. Jay, thank you for educating me, quite frankly, and our listeners. I, while I'm not an energy nerd as you self proclaim, but I'm like super excited about this stuff'cause I really think technology, and I say this often on the show, technology for technology's sake is worthless. But technology that truly solves business challenges and makes our lives better is a huge piece of where things are going. I did forget, and we got through 39 minutes without talking about ai. Where is AI coming

Jay Fiske:

Yeah, no, what not coming in. It's here,

Jeremy Julian:

it's here and that's I'd love for you to share a little bit about where that future of AI is already here and how it's truly automating some of the things that you guys are doing.

Jay Fiske:

yeah. so one example is we've layered on some AI technology on the energy side. So if you think about a facility that say like a quick serve restaurant may have three rooftop units conditioning the space, normally they just operate independently. Whenever this one sees it, it's hot, it's gonna turn on, it may turn on simultaneously with the one right next to it. What that does is it drives what's called the peak demand, right? The peak power consumption at the restaurant. It drives it way higher. And so the utilities actually charge you both for your total energy consumption, but they also charge restaurants for peak power consumption. So we can

Jeremy Julian:

pricing like Uber when you're going to a concert.

Jay Fiske:

Great. Great analogy. so Metallica's in town and you're gonna spend a lot for, your Uber ride. So yeah, when all three rooftops reins are running simultaneously, right? So we can apply, we have applied AI to that, to coordinate, say, this one runs okay now this one runs now. So to try and prevent them from running simultaneously to reduce that, that demand charge. And so there's one just very specific example of ai. we've got some other ai, coming that will enhance some of the, the diagnostics. believe it or not, may. most multi-site operators actually don't have a comprehensive and up-to-date list of make model and specs for things like HVAC equipment. So we don't always know how they're supposed to behave'cause we don't have the specs, but we're applying AI to say, oh, here's how it behaves here. We can deduce what using ai. what this system is supposed to be doing, and they get a little bit more precise about when it's experiencing trouble. So yeah, there's, and that's just, we're just scratching the surface. But yeah, there's, AI is already here on our platform and we're adding more and more every day.

Jeremy Julian:

I love it. Jay, thank you for educating me. Thank you for educating our listeners. as I said on the onset, guys, I know that you guys got lots of choices, so thanks for hanging out. If you haven't already subscribed, please do so on your favorite player. Check out Jay's organization, powerhouse Dynamics, open Kitchen, and, give him a call. Honestly, there's not, doesn't cost you anything other than maybe an hour of your time to kinda share what your problems are and let them, let them see if they can solve your problem. to our listeners, make it a great day.

Jay Fiske:

Thank you so much, Jeremy.

Speaker:

Thanks for listening to The Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Visit restaurant technology guys.com for tips, industry insights, and more to help you run your restaurant better.

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Jeremy Julian

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