Frontline International’s patent-pending Box System for Standard Packaged Oil, winner of a 2012 Kitchen Innovations Award from the National Restaurant Association, was installed in December 2011 at the Burger King in South Paris, Maine. Owner/manager Bill Gannon also owns and operates six other Burger King restaurants in Maine.
Frontline’s Box System for Standard Packaged Oil is an automated, convenient, safer, and more cost-effective way to dispense fresh cooking oil for refilling fryers. Users simply purchase their choice of fresh oil in boxes or jugs from any vendor.
Boxes or jugs of fresh cooking oil are placed upside-down in the Frontline Box System and are connected to the Frontline fresh oil pump station. Several boxes can be connected to several fryers simultaneously.
Fryers are filled either automatically or by using a convenient, no-mess dispensing wand. The upside-down storage method dispenses every drop of oil, increasing yields by up to 10 percent. And because operators can continue to purchase their own oil while still automating the dispensing, there are no fees, no leases, and no contracts.
In Gannon’s Burger King, they keep three boxes of oil on the top rack that are connected to the fryers, with space for up to 12 spare boxes below. He usually keeps about six spare boxes on the rack.
Before the installation of the Frontline Box System, the restaurant used jugs of oil that employees had to pour manually into the fryers.
When asked how he likes the new Frontline Box System, Gannon says, “We love it! We never have to touch the oil any more—it’s all automatic. No more oil on the floor, no more burns from hot oil, and the boxes are very easy to change … It’s such a clean system.”
Gannon added that now, his kitchen employees don’t have to top off the oil in the fryers all day, freeing them up to do other tasks. Gannon says it istoo soon to calculate any savings on oil costs yet, but he has bought less oil than they usually do in the same time period.
He has also noticed savings on labor and time. “We save, on average, at least 20 to 30 minutes per day in not having to change the oil in the fryers manually,” he says.
With the jug oil system, he says, employees had to pour oil constantly all day, which “made a mess on the floors that had to be constantly cleaned up.”
Giovanni Brienza, Frontline’s Vice President, handled the sale and installation and instructed the Burger King staff how to operate the system.
