Don Feinstein has learned an expensive lesson: Though initially costly to achieve, energy efficiency is money in the bank. Over the last year, the chairman of Emerald Foods Inc. and Diamond Foods LLC, two Wendy’s franchise companies, converted seven of his restaurants in Texas into energy-efficient establishments, and he is planning to do the same with the rest of his units, which are located in Dallas, Houston and Louisiana. He hired Dallas-based energy consultant Current Energy to help with the conversions, which he says have yielded huge financial rewards.
What prompted you to become energy efficient?
Obviously, energy costs are huge in our industry, and in Texas, where we operate, energy is deregulated, so costs are just terrible. We were paying between $3,000 and $5,000 per restaurant per month [in energy costs]; that’s a big number. If you multiply 44 restaurants by $4,000, that’s $2,112,000. We’re talking a lot of money here, so if you can save, say, 20 percent—which is what we’re doing—that’s a big number.
Isn’t the economy causing a lot of operators to rethink how much they spend?
Yes. The problem is that [going green] requires a decent-sized investment, and in this economy a lot of restaurateurs are putting [plans] on hold because [the cost] is high. But the payback is great.
What did you learn from implementing the green programs?
The whole point is to be more efficient. In the old days, you’d come in first thing in the morning and turn on all the equipment at once. Now we space that out—the purpose being to use less energy. I’ll say this: There’s a lot of inefficiency in monitoring restaurant equipment. It just makes sense conceptually to do this. I think eventually you’ll see a lot of restaurants [becoming more energy efficient]. It’ll be much more commonplace in the future because the long-term cost of energy won’t go down.