Ecolab's Apex: Rethinking dishwashers

When Ecolab manager Tim Anger conducted his monthly inspection at the T.G.I. Friday's restaurant in Bloomington early Monday, he found a money siphon.

A clogged dishwasher valve might seem like a minor problem, but left unaddressed, it means the restaurant would use extra hot water, electricity, detergent and labor to rewash soiled pots and dishes two and three times.

At 50 cents per rack, clogged dishwasher valves and spray jets and half-empty dish racks quickly run up the operating costs for thousands of Ecolab's restaurant and hotel customers, Anger said.

His job is to work as a consultant with restaurants, helping them find their inefficiencies, while also offering St. Paul-based Ecolab's new Apex dishwasher monitoring system, which it introduced in August, to 2,000 restaurants and cafeterias across North America.

Ecolab has armed Anger and 2,000 other sales and service reps with sleek, infrared computer tablets that instantly capture data from the Apex box attached to a dishwasher. The Apex computer analyzes how much water, electricity and detergent the restaurant uses each day. The data is mapped against the number of customers, staff and racks run through the dishwasher to spot efficiency problems.

So far, 200 chain restaurants have begun adopting the Apex system.

According to the National Restaurant Association, a restaurant that has $1 million in annual sales will spend about $26,000 each year to wash and sanitize its dishes. Ecolab expects that Apex could save such businesses $2,500 a year in water, energy and chemical costs.

And customers expect much from Apex, as well.

T.G.I. Friday's strategic operations Vice President Jay Johns, who piloted the system in 10 locations, said this year that he plans to expand Apex into 590 more locations next year, including the one Anger services monthly across from the Mall of America.

"We are pretty confident that we can become 10 percent more efficient with the Apex system. At 600 restaurants, that is a significant amount," Johns said. "If we just do 10 percent, that's 22,000 gallons of water, 5,500 kilowatts of electricity and 120 pounds of plastic packaging saved per restaurant on an annual basis. ... This is a huge environmental going-green effort. The byproduct is that you save money."

T.G.I. Friday's believes that it will save "tens of thousands of dollars a year" by making small changes based on what it learns from Apex.

"The biggest thing we saw in the pilot is that our [employee] dishwashers ... would run racks through [the machines] that were not full," wasting water and energy. Workers are being retrained to only run the dishwasher when full, "just like you do at home," Johns said.

"The Radisson hotels have the restaurants and the large banquet facilities. Now, we can tell them how efficient their team is and have an impact on that," Green said.

Customers are not the only beneficiaries. Apex is also helping Ecolab's service workers become more productive.

Using his new computer tablet, Anger can point and click at an Apex terminal to download its data. The data can then be translated into a colorful, chart-filled report that is e-mailed to restaurant managers 24 hours after Anger's monthly inspection, instead of weeks later using the old paper forms.

Data captured at another restaurant chain in Eagan two months ago helped that eatery cut 2 percent off its water and detergent use, Anger said.

"They were not sending more racks through and yet they were getting more dishes done," he said.

"We are trying to improve our gross margins, which allows the restaurant owner to succeed," said Jim Miller, Ecolab's executive vice president of its billion-dollar institutional business. "Years ago, people viewed water as free. Today in a restaurant there is a cost and it's hard to pass it along to the restaurant customer. Customers said, 'I need help with my processes.' So we act as consultants."

Pilot tests in Dallas, Houston and Eagan found that some kitchen workers "weren't using the presoak option [on the dishwasher], and so were washing the same pot five times trying to get it clean," Ecolab food service marketing director Maarten Potjer said.

The manager of Abuelos Mexican restaurant in Dallas found that his staff was washing 800 racks of dishes a day. "We were washing more racks than we were serving people," manager Nathan Gilkes said.

Potjer said it often takes three visits to persuade kitchen managers that the numbers are real and worth the retraining that Ecolab provides.

During a visit to one customer, "I stood there with the manager and watched a chef walk over and place just a spatula in the rack and run it through [the washer]. It costs roughly 50 cents to run a rack," Potjer said. "So going from 800 racks to 500 racks a day, that's saving $150 a day in water and energy and labor."