Restaurant Technologies Defines its Climate Strategy

As a leader in circular solutions for cooking oil, Restaurant Technologies (RT) set out to advance its climate strategy and engage its food service customers along the way. As a cooking oil supplier to leading food service brands, RT’s Total Oil Management solution manages the full cooking oil life cycle – from delivery of fresh oil, to restaurant filtration, monitoring oil levels, and end-of-life recycling of used oil.

Connected through a private equity investor, Pure Strategies worked with RT to map the company’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, set reduction targets, and develop GHG tracking tools. Private equity firm ECP sought out RT after seeing a strong-performing company with a well-developed sustainability value proposition.

Defining the path to GHG emissions reductions

Pure Strategies started its work for RT by developing a GHG emissions inventory. This process of accounting for the company’s value chain emissions included collecting data on each aspect of the business, such as oil processing and logistics. The effort highlighted the key sources of emissions and helped RT pinpoint reduction opportunities.These opportunities included the electrification and use of renewable fuels in the company’s fleet of vans and trucks, as well as the procurement of renewable energy to power depots and offices.

With an understanding of interventions needed to reduce GHG emissions, RT then set an ambitious goal aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi): a 42% reduction of scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 2030 from the 2020 baseline, which supports the 1.5°C global warming scenario from SBTi.

To track progress against the goal, our team trained RT employees in the fundamentals of carbon accounting and how to update the carbon footprint year-over-year. This internal training was completed through customized workshops led by members of the Pure Strategies team.

Helping customers see the sustainability benefits

Since RT services provide circular and lower-impact food service cooking oil solutions, the company wanted to communicate these benefits to its customers. Pure Strategies helped RT create a tool that calculates the sustainability benefits that are inherent to RT’s Total Oil Management solution. This tool can help RT customers quantify their sustainability impact through metrics such as total amount of avoided packaging, petroleum diesel, and GHG emissions. It can also calculate the total amount of waste oil recycled by purchasing cooking oil through RT’s circular approach. Insight into these metrics can help RT’s customers to meet their own GHG reduction targets.

In its 2022 ESG Report, for example, RT stated that it recycled nearly 270 million pounds of waste oil and saved an estimated 62.5 million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions from entering the atmosphere in 2021. In 2022, RT recycled nearly 290 million pounds of waste oil and avoided over 66 million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions.

“We care deeply about environmental sustainability and are taking the initiative to lower our carbon footprint by 2030 — while providing solutions to make commercial kitchens safer and more sustainable,” notes Diana Geseking, General Counsel for Restaurant Technologies who leads ESG efforts for the enterprise. “Pure Strategies helped us define our carbon footprint and work with our customers and suppliers to reduce the food service industry’s carbon emissions and waste through more sustainable sourcing, recycling used cooking oil into eco-friendly biofuels, and helping to create a more circular economy for our industry.”

Further, Pure Strategies’ sustainability consulting helped RT establish its climate strategy to attract private equity firms and other investors that were seeking to improve the sustainability value of companies in their portfolios. As a leader and innovator in the sustainability sector, Energy Capital Partners (ECP) ultimately recognized RT as a strong fit given their sustainability program, business model, and customer base.