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The Connected Restaurant program digitally transformed operations at over 150 KFC restaurants of Sapphire Foods.
Achieved award-winning results in enhancing food safety, improving occupant comfort and saving energy.
The Client
Sapphire Foods India Pvt. Ltd. (Sapphire Foods) operates over 700 restaurants, including KFC, across India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
The Challenge
Sapphire Foods is a leader in a highly competitive and demanding segment with fast growth. They focus on enhancing the quality of their service, to drive customer loyalty and improve margins. They aimed to more efficiently manage equipment and operations at their KFC restaurants. This would enable them to improve food quality, enhance customer satisfaction and increase energy savings.
The Solution
The Connected Restaurant Program was deployed across their restaurant network. We liaised with their technical team to understand the store equipment by studying the data on energy consumption, temperature, and equipment performance for the baseline period. This vast amount of data, sourced from each restaurant's Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) equipment, refrigeration and kitchen equipment, sensors, controllers, energy meters and systems, was fed into the CORTIX™ platform.
The CORTIX platform is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) platform that offers predictive insights, prescriptive recommendations, and autonomous actions to optimize equipment performance and building operations. Upon integration, the platform enabled the optimization of operations proactively, to conserve energy and reduce costs. The platform also helped proactively identify critical equipment health issues and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) based deviations. The performance of restaurant equipment was continuously monitored to address inefficiencies and identify operational issues that led to compliance deviations.
Restaurant managers were proactively supported by our 24/7 BluEdge™ Command Center, with its team of data scientists and domain experts, to manage their operations and equipment. The BluEdge Command Center collates and interprets the insights, identifies trends and requisites interventions, defines action plans and ensures their completion in a timely manner. Energy wastage scenarios were discovered and restaurant-specific energy-saving strategies and conservation measures were identified. The predictive insights were deployed by the remote team proactively to intervene before any issues developed into larger problems. These actionable intelligent insights were also made available to the franchise management team through an easy-to-use intuitive dashboard.
We used our patented Service Window® framework to understand the correlation between energy consumption patterns and operations patterns. Based on effectively monitoring energy consumption in these service windows, we detected and plugged energy deviations and leakages that occurred on a day-to-day basis, and this tighter control across service windows led to savings.
The Result
The Connected Restaurant Program focused on uncovering opportunities to save and sustain energy savings. Initially deployed in 100 restaurants, the program was subsequently scaled up to over 160 restaurants. Sapphire Foods was able to reduce energy consumption, improve guest experience, enhance food safety and improve equipment reliability.
- Approximately 8% average engagement wide energy savings achieved through October 2023, from the time of commencement in November 2016
- Cold room temperature compliance maintained on average at 91% for the 12-month period from November 2022 to October 2023
- On average, a 13% increase in Guest comfort compliance for the period January to October 2022 versus the same period in 2021
This engagement won a “Best Energy Efficient Case Study” award from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at the 2018 National Energy Efficiency Circle competition – a national-level event in India.
“For us, the key challenges are driving consumer’s loyalty and of course, improving our margins. So it is imperative that we manage our equipment and operations efficiently without compromising on food quality and customer satisfaction.
In 2016, we partnered with EcoEnergy Insights as their solution suited our requirements. A combination of new technologies and smart operating practices were implemented, that reduced the use of energy as well as wastages at our stores. Insights from their platform helped proactively predict the chances of failure in advance. We were able to optimize our operations across the network of restaurants.”
Deepak Taluja
Chief Operating Officer, KFC at Sapphire Foods India Private Ltd.
EcoEnergy Insights won a 2020 IoT Global Award for the Connected Restaurant Program in the Retail, Marketing and Hospitality category.