Everyone likes fresh eggs in the morning, and one of our quick serve restaurant customers did steady business with made-to-order eggs on breakfast sandwiches. The customer knew that their eggs should be refrigerated, so to make it easy for the griddle chef, they placed an under-counter refrigerator directly below the griddle for easy access to eggs and other sandwich proteins.

However, once the customer installed SiteSage temperature monitoring in the refrigerator, they noticed that the frequent door openings (the chef would open the fridge for every egg) introduced a lot of hot air into the unit, and due to its small size and placement crammed below a griddle, the refrigerator simply wasn’t able to recover temperature until long after the breakfast rush died down. The chart here shows the temperature (red line) inside the unit and its rapid rise in temperature during the rush just before 9:00 am.

Rather than risk the safety of the whole unit’s worth of product, the customer adjusted behavior to reduce the number of door openings by quickly grabbing a dozen or more eggs at a time out of the unit when they were busy; thus delaying the time until the next door opening was required. This small change saves energy while keeping the balance of the eggs at an appropriate storage temperature until they’re needed.

Would you like more tips for energy management in restaurants?