Monday 18 February 2013

Energy savings with Gusto – restaurant owner saves £500k

The owner of upmarket restaurant chain Gusto saved more than £500,000 in two years by nosing out unsavoury charges on its energy bills.

Restaurant and bar operator Living Ventures owns Gusto - which has restaurants in Edinburgh, Liverpool and Notting Hill – and also counts eatery Est Est Est among its businesses.

Energy consultancy STC Energy poured the fine dining firm’s accounts, invoices and buildings information into a database so it could pick out ways to save energy costs, such as overly expensive estimated utility bills.

The bar operator also installed automated meter reading (AMR) technology so it could get half-hourly information on electricity use at its sites all over the country.

A spokesperson for the food group said: “Moving from the standard electricity meters in our numerous national restaurant sites to AMR meters within a very short space of time could have been a difficult and costly exercise for Living Ventures. STC's professional site operations team fully managed the entire changeover process in an efficient manner. The overall process was actually quite painless.”