💰 Case Study: Why good restaurants choose seed oils

Recently I had a call with the owner of two large Italian restaurants in a major US metro. We’ll call the restaurants “Francesca’s Italian Kitchen” 1 & 2.

“The reason we have our NY strip on the menu is because thats what I eat when I go to my restaurant."

The owner had cut seed oils from his diet, but was finding it economically impossible to remove them from his restaurants.

(Key takeaways for diners at the end)

The restaurants together do $5M in revenue, but operate at a 7% profit margin. That means $350K/year in profit across them.

Switching off of seed oils without raising prices would 3-5X the blend oil cost, adding at least $120K in expenses and lowering profits by -34%

Here’s why:

The bulk oil (soybean)

This is delivered by hose via RTI’s total oil management system, detailed in our viral instagram reel. He changes this daily, but is not considering swapping it out. It would be too expensive to do so, as this system saves tons in labor and cleanup.

The blended oil (canola / olive)

Even this was proving a challenge to swap to pure olive. For many preparations, the smoke point of pure EVOO is too low, and the owner rightfully doesn’t trust avocado oil sourcing.

Cultured oil options were 5x the price of an olive oil blend at the time of this call, and pure EVOO was 3x the price.

This would mean, assuming menu prices stayed constant, at least an additional $120K in spend across the restaurants.

Key takeaways:

• Fewer tables, less seed oils: Larger restaurants are more likely to get sticker shock and serve you seed oils. The fewer the tables, the more likely you are to be served real fats.

• Cheap Italian is always a blend: Nearly all large family style italian restaurants are even putting seed oil blends on the tables for dipping bread. You get what you pay for

• Make more noise: Consumers need to unite and signal that they care about cooking oils to justify the extra “$2 or so” in menu price, as they did for gluten free

• Regional collective bargaining for restaurants?: The owner was interested in exploring collective bulk bargaining with other restaurants in his region, that would allow them to secure healthy oils at lower prices. SOS could explore helping facilitate this in the future.

How soybean oil gets trucked in by hose, below: