Business Energy for Dark Kitchens

Refrigeration, which catches most operators out. Monitoring of fourteen UK commercial kitchens found refrigeration took 41% of kitchen electricity, more than any single piece of cooking equipment, because it runs every hour of the year while cooking happens in bursts. Cooking took the other 59%, led by fryers at 14%, combination ovens at 12% and grills at 12%.

Because there is nothing else on the bill. A restaurant spreads its energy across a dining room, so the kitchen is a share of the total; a delivery-only site is kitchen from wall to wall. The 118% spread between the most and least efficient monitored kitchens therefore applies to almost your whole bill rather than to part of it.

More than most people expect. In that same study the least efficient kitchen used 118% more electricity per meal than the most efficient, 3.32 kWh against 1.52 kWh. That gap is equipment, settings and habits rather than menu, which means a good part of it is recoverable without changing what you sell.

It can. Covering delivery peaks from lunch into late night puts a meaningful share of consumption outside standard business hours, which is exactly when a time-of-use contract is worth testing. It needs your meter data rather than an assumption, because refrigeration running overnight changes the arithmetic.

If peak demand reaches 100kW it is a legal requirement. Plenty of kitchens get there once you add refrigeration, cooking and extraction together. It is worth having rather than merely tolerating: half-hourly data lets a supplier price the load you actually have instead of an assumed profile.

Only if the supply is in your name and you hold the contract. In many shared kitchen buildings energy is part of the licence fee or recharged by the operator, in which case the switching decision is theirs rather than yours. It is worth establishing which of those you are before anyone quotes you.

20%, in almost every case, plus the Climate Change Levy, because this is business premises. The reduced 5% rate applies only at very low consumption, which a working kitchen will exceed comfortably. We confirm your position as part of the comparison rather than leaving you to find out from the first bill.

Yes. Multiple sites can move onto one supplier with a single renewal date, even where the current contracts all expire at different times. It cuts the admin and the combined volume usually sharpens the rate.

Yes. Renewable tariffs backed by REGO certificates are widely available and now often priced in line with standard ones, so the premium that used to rule them out has largely gone.

Around four to six weeks from agreement to go-live, with no interruption to supply and nothing to change in the kitchen.