Energy efficiency for retail and food retail

Miscusi was our first client, the point where it all started.

We began by putting the pasta cookers under remote control: switching them on and off at set times, no longer depending on whoever opens or closes the restaurant. This first automation alone produced substantial savings.

From there we widened the scope: monitoring of the cold rooms, environmental monitoring, and control of HVAC, lighting and air curtains.

We started with three restaurants and today we cover every directly managed store. The ongoing dialogue with the Miscusi team, led by Marco Garoglio, Luca Simone and Matteo Wagner, was decisive in growing our solution into what we offer today.

Who says there's nothing to save in a 50-square-meter store? It's the first objection we heard, and it's the one the Yamamay project dismantled.

We installed our sensors to measure temperature and humidity in every store, and connected everything that consumes energy to the system: air curtains, air conditioning, lighting, shop windows and air exchange. From then on, the store runs itself.

The automation doesn't follow a fixed schedule, it reads actual conditions: it recognizes when the air curtain becomes unnecessary in the milder seasons and switches it off, and knows when it pays to turn the heating down and when to turn it up instead. Without the store staff having to think about it.

The result is 20% lower consumption and steadier comfort for customers and staff, with a return on investment in 12 monthly installments. The rollout covered both existing stores and new openings.

At KFC we track temperature and humidity across all stores and watch over the cold rooms: if something is about to go wrong, the store knows before it becomes a problem.

In the kitchen we control the most energy-hungry equipment, fryers and grills first of all, while air conditioning is integrated directly with LG AC Smart.

On top of it all runs a predictive model: it estimates how much energy each store will use during the day, flags anomalous deviations, and combines weather data, expected footfall and the building's thermal inertia to schedule the air conditioning at the right moment.

Then there's a problem that comes up often in food retail: the power available at the meter isn't enough. In the flagship store we reduced the committed kW while keeping the restaurant fully operational, with no hiccups for service.

Today we're in every directly managed store and are extending the rollout to the 2K16 and BFMFood franchisees. Overall savings across the network are 15%.