The Challenge
Restaurants are some of the largest energy and water users among commercial businesses, and they have the most potential for water and energy savings. However, meeting the needs and objectives of various restaurant owners – from one-store mom-and-pop burger joints to large chain restaurants – requires tailored solutions. In addition, getting restaurant owners to understand and accept that being sustainable is an objective of growing importance requires some basic education.
Ecos Solutions
The Ecos Business Solutions division – working closely with Ecos’ own in-house Green Marketing team – worked to create a user-friendly and educational mini Web site, called The Sustainability Resource Center, hosted on Coca-Cola’s Customer Solutions site. Here, restaurant customers can click the “Go Green” tab and obtain a wealth of information, including research studies on the benefits of going green, a self-assessment tool, recommendations for no and low-cost resource reduction strategies, discounts on “green” products and services, success stories, and more.
Building upon its work with Burgerville, Ecos Business Solutions created a Sustainability Platform to offer via the Web site: three “Tiers” of services to offer to restaurant customers; depending on how interested they are in sustainability, what they are already doing, and how far they want to go. Services include educational Webinars, assessments, audits, resource baselines, GHG emissions calculations, and a Sustainability Action Plan. For each client, Ecos begins with understanding the customer’s objectives and goals, which will allow Ecos to tailor the most cost-effective solutions.
To educate Coca-Cola’s restaurant customers, Ecos and Coca-Cola also created a suite of support materials used by Coca-Cola’s sales staff. Educational PowerPoint presentations, leave-behind brochures and cut sheets were all created to help customers understand why sustainability should be important to them, what Coca-Cola is doing to improve its own environmental performance, and what steps restaurant owners can take to start saving resources and improve their bottom line, via the Sustainability Resource Center.
Finally, Ecos, Burgerville and Coca-Cola collaborated to create a video success story based on the initial work that Ecos conducted for Burgerville. Filmed inside a local Burgerville restaurant, the video takes customers behind the scenes at Burgerville to discover not only how sustainable practices has made it one of the Northwest’s most successful and popular fast-food chains, but how Ecos was able to uncover even more savings through energy and water reduction strategies.
View the full case study in PDF format.
