PENN Entertainment is the nation’s largest regional gaming operator with 43 casinos, racetracks and destinations across North America. In addition to entertaining millions of visitors each year, its exceptional culinary team feeds hungry guests and employees across every location at nearly every hour of the day. 

From steaks, pasta, fried chicken, and shrimp to tempura and French fries, guests feed their cravings and enjoy wall-to-wall entertainment. In the kitchen, however, the massive amounts of oil used to create many menu items required the heavy lifting of oil jugs (called JIBs) and handling of hot used oil, which can be a messy, time consuming experience for team members. 

As a company dedicated to fun, safety, and sustainability, PENN Entertainment sought out a more efficient and productive kitchen solution that would result in a cleaner and safer environment for its team members, while also upholding PENN’s high standards of food quality. 

Uncovering the Challenge 

Most casino guests only see the lobby, casino floor, restaurants, and guest rooms. However, each casino has a massive back-of-house footprint. This is where the magic happens—foodservice, laundry and housekeeping, maintenance, administrative offices, employee lounges, and other areas. The maze of service corridors underneath the public areas run huge lengths, making moving oil around an unappealing task. 

Before investing in an automated oil management solution, culinary staff were tasked with manually hauling hundreds of pounds of used cooking oil through the corridors every day from kitchens to outdoor access areas with grease pits, or from delivery trucks back to the kitchen.

According to Corey Johnson, director of Strategic Sourcing at PENN, “this manual, messy process was inefficient. Our team members were spending time transporting oil around the facility when they could be using this time to focus on food quality, consistency, and customer experience.”

Serving Up a Solution 

PENN brought in Restaurant Technologies to assess its back-of-house operations and propose an innovative solution to its existing oil management program. With over 25 years of helping restaurants, casinos, and other foodservice businesses solve similar oil challenges, Restaurant Technologies knew it could replace the outdated manual process with a completely automated system.

Restaurant Technologies and PENN began by collaborating across PENN's facilities management and culinary teams to identify the problem areas and opportunities to introduce automated oil management. Restaurant Technologies conducted on-site assessments to create a customized solution for each PENN property based on kitchen locations, oil usage, and access to outdoor oil fill and retrieval locations. 

The automated oil management approach eliminates the need for team members to manually transport cooking oil to and from kitchens by hand or with pumps, barrels or buckets, solving problems associated with handling, safety and wasted time. 

“We worked with Restaurant Technologies to implement a custom-designed infrastructure of interior piping,” explained Johnson. “Now, fresh oil is delivered on-demand to fryers while used cooking oil is safely extracted at the push of a button. Both fresh and used oil is stored in secured bulk oil tank locations, easily accessible to the outside where Restaurant Technologies manages our schedule of refilling and removing oil as needed.”

Booting Back-of-House Productivity, Safety and Food Quality

PENN also has access to Restaurant Technologies’ Total Oil Management (TOM) portal—cloud-based software that allows kitchen managers to monitor the amount of oil used, the cadence of filtration, and adherence to standard oil management operating procedures. For example, if fryer oil is not being filtered on a regular schedule, it can lead to poor food taste and quality. By adhering to its own standard operating procedures, the TOM portal ensures the quality of its fried foods served to PENN diners across their enterprise.

This "set it and forget it" approach allows culinary staff to focus on food preparation and presentation versus heavy lifting and cleaning. Restaurant Technologies’ tanks and smart monitoring also optimize oil usage to reduce waste, enhance financial performance, and support PENN's sustainability commitments.

Since implementing Restaurant Technologies’ automated oil management system across nearly 75% of its properties, PENN has realized tremendous labor efficiency, sustainability and operational gains. 

In one year, PENN recycled more than 865,000 pounds of used cooking oil through Restaurant Technologies’ biofuel program – a more than 38% increase from the previous year. It also helps that PENN gets a credit back for its used cooking oil, helping offset the price of the system. Through automation, the kitchens also eliminated approximately 39,800 plastic oil JIBs which no longer go into landfills. 

“We were able to improve back-of-house productivity, safety and food quality by removing manual oil handling from our team members' responsibilities,” said Johnson. “This approach and the partnership we have with Restaurant Technologies aligns with and furthers our strategic goals for operational excellence, corporate responsibility, and employee well-being. It’s a win-win.”