Environmental Commitment

Our Design Standard
Directed by our LEED Green Associate Amy Hegarty, ASID, CID, CFSP, every design begins with energy-efficient and low water-consuming equipment. Since quality energy and water efficient products cost no more than other quality foodservice equipment, the client’s return on investment (ROI) begins on day one of operation.

Committed Clients
For clients who are highly committed to green design and operations and who have additional capital to invest, we can incorporate many other green features into the kitchen, such as:

• Highly advanced exhaust hoods with modulating demand controls, which reduce HVAC loads significantly, and advanced high-efficiency grease filtration, which removes more effluents prior to exhausting to the atmosphere
• Warewashers that require hot water only to initially fill the tanks at the beginning of the day and then operate throughout the rest of the day using only cold water. These washers use the waste heat from the operation to preheat the incoming cold water to the point where the booster heater can further increase the water temperature to the required 180 degree rinse.
• LED lighting in hoods and walk-ins
• More versatile cooking equipment, which reduces the number of appliances required and, consequently, reduces the footprint of the kitchen

For clients who choose to purchase locally grown produce to support local farmers and to reduce transportation cost, we can incorporate the additional washing, sanitizing, and processing equipment required to ensure locally grown items receive the same cleaning and processing as those received from commercial distributors.

We can tailor the design to support clients who want to incorporate composting and recycling programs in their operations. Additional space can be allocated for processing and storing recyclables, such as cardboard, glass, metal and plastic. Supplementary equipment may be required if there are plans to compost vegetable waste and compostable dinnerware, and preparing such waste for the offsite composting facility can be done with specialized pulpers that compact and dehydrate the waste prior to transferring to the composting site.

Complete site monitoring and energy management control packages are available that offer improved energy efficiency and equipment monitoring with failure notification and remote diagnosis as options.

All the above alternatives are initially more costly than traditional methods, but they have a demonstrated ROI.  With our experience we can guide our clients to the correct choices for their particular situation.