Business costs for restaurants

Restaurants sit at the top end of energy intensity per square metre. Gas runs the cooking line; electricity runs extraction canopies, walk-in chillers, freezers, dishwashers and hot holding. Extraction in particular is frequently underestimated — a canopy running at full speed through a service is a substantial continuous load, and in many kitchens it is switched on at open and off at close regardless of what is actually cooking.

• Variable-speed extraction control is the highest-value efficiency upgrade in a commercial kitchen, because it matches fan speed to what the line is actually doing.
• Walk-in chiller and freezer door discipline and seal condition matter more than any tariff change you can negotiate.
• Staggering the start-up of the cooking line rather than firing everything at once reduces peak demand, which matters if you are on a half-hourly meter with capacity charges.
• Gas has broadly been running 7–9p per kWh on negotiated fixed contracts against 10–14p deemed. On a restaurant’s gas volume that gap is significant.

Restaurant waste splits into food waste, used cooking oil, glass, cardboard and general. Used cooking oil is the one that surprises operators: it cannot go into general waste or down the drain, it must go to a registered carrier, and it is often collected free or at low cost because it has resale value as biodiesel feedstock. Paying to dispose of it usually means you are with the wrong carrier.

Fats, oils and grease entering the drainage system are the other recurring cost. Water companies can and do recharge for blockages traced to a premises, and a failed grease trap is far more expensive than maintaining one. This sits outside your waste contract but belongs in the same review.

Insurers price restaurants primarily on fire risk, and the specifics matter: whether you deep fry, the condition and cleaning schedule of your extraction ductwork, and whether you have suppression fitted over the cooking line. A documented duct cleaning schedule is one of the few things that genuinely moves a restaurant premium, and it is worth having in writing before you go to market.

• Employers’ liability — legally required, and kitchen staff are a higher-risk employee group than most.
• Public and product liability — both essential; allergen incidents fall under product liability.
• Buildings and contents — commercial kitchen equipment is expensive to reinstate; check you are not underinsured on a figure set years ago.
• Business interruption — set the indemnity period against how long a fire-damaged kitchen would realistically take to rebuild and re-fit. Twelve months is frequently too short for a full strip-out.
• Deterioration of refrigerated stock — a walk-in failure over a bank holiday weekend is a real and common claim.

A modern restaurant runs a booking platform, an EPOS, card terminals, and often two or three separate delivery-platform tablets, all on one connection. Business fibre at £25–£60 a month generally covers it, but the resilience question matters more than in most trades: an outage on a Friday evening is not recoverable revenue.

• 4G/5G failover is the single best value connectivity purchase a restaurant makes.
• Segregate guest wifi from EPOS and card terminals on separate networks.
• Check upload speed, not just download, if you use cloud-based EPOS with card and stock syncing.
• If you run several sites on one platform, the leased line conversation becomes worth having — typically £200–£600+ a month, and justified by what downtime costs rather than by speed.