About 2.2 million pounds of fresh restaurant cooking oil leave Restaurant Technologies’ trucks every single day. Sit with that number for a second. Then sit with the one Alissa Partee dropped right behind it — that volume represents roughly 12% of the restaurants in this country.
Twelve percent. Which means the other 88% are still hauling jugs of oil across a kitchen floor by hand.
I have been talking with the RTI team for about four years now, ever since David on their PR and marketing side first reached out and I realized I had no idea this company existed. I still walk away from every one of those conversations surprised. This week I got to sit down with Alissa Partee, who stepped into the CEO seat in July following Jeff Kiesel, who led that organization for nearly 22 years. Big shoes to fill — she said it out loud before I could get it out of my mouth.
What made this conversation different from the other RTI episodes we have done is where Alissa came from. She did not come up through supply chain or engineering. She came up through people, then fell in love with operations, and that combination shows up in everything she says about the business.
Nobody Picks HR. HR Picks You.
Alissa is quick to tell you nobody chooses human resources. “You never really pick HR,” she said. “HR picks you, or you fall into it somehow.” Hers picked her in Chicago, while she was finishing an MBA in corporate finance and human resource management and doing nonprofit work on the side. A friend named Don Delves offered her a seat doing executive compensation consulting, and that is where the thread starts.
Through that work she met Sally Smith and Mary Twinem at Buffalo Wild Wings, back in 2009 and 2010 when, as Alissa put it, they were the belle of the ball. She joined BWW on the total rewards side of HR. After her MBA she moved to Minneapolis, then spent eight years at Marvin Windows and Doors up in Warroad, Minnesota — a family-owned business where she stayed in HR on paper but drifted hard toward operations. “That’s actually where I started really having a lot of fun on an operations side of the business,” she said. “Really falling in love with that side of how things work.”
Then food service pulled her back in: about three years with Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels, and then Restaurant Technologies came along. She was not looking. She has never really been looking. “It just brought everything together,” she said — food service, an operations bent, and an industry she adores.
I have joked on this show that I could probably make a living running a support group for restaurant people who cannot seem to leave the industry. Alissa is exhibit A, and she is not apologizing for it.
The Worst Kept Secret in Restaurant Cooking Oil
Here is the thing about RTI: the name does not help them. “A lot of people say, you must be on the POS side of the business,” Alissa said. “I said, no, actually we’re not. We’re on the oil side of the business.”
What they actually do is automate and outsource the cooking oil side of your restaurant. They install two tanks — indoor, outdoor, or a combination of both — and run a closed-loop, push-button system between those tanks and your fryers. Fresh oil arrives on their own proprietarily built trucks and fills the fresh tank just in time. You fill your fryer from it. When that oil hits end of life, it flows out of the fryer into the waste tank. The next delivery picks up the waste while it drops off the fresh.
Nobody carries anything. Nobody wheels a cart of screaming hot oil past the dish pit. No JIBs stacked in a corner, no rendering tank out back. Alissa said it plainly: “It’s incredibly safe. We’re so safe, in fact, that we actually help our restaurant partners save on their insurance premiums.”
They run 40 depots — their word, borrowed from train depots — across the lower 48. With that footprint they can already reach about 92% of restaurants in the country without opening a single new location. And they deliver 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whether you are open or closed, because the connection is made through an exterior wall.
That last piece is why you may never have seen one of their trucks. As I told Alissa, most of us are not hanging around a parking lot at one in the morning.
Just-in-Time Only Works If the Data Does
Just-in-time is easy to say and hard to earn. Alissa framed the bar RTI has to clear: not too early, so they are not in your space more often than they need to be, and never too late, so you never run out.
The tanks are 1,400 pounds, and they are instrumented. The system pings RTI’s home office multiple times a day with what is left. A tank reporting 100 pounds might mean a couple of days of runway for a light user, or a single day for a heavy fryer operation. RTI runs that against the location’s historical usage to calculate days on hand, and routes trucks off of it.
Notice what the operator has to do in that loop: nothing. “They don’t have to go online and fill out an order form,” Alissa said. “They do not have to think about it. We do it all for them.” One invoice, all the oil, delivered at once, with the cost transparent enough to sit inside a food cost conversation.
For anyone who has watched a general manager forget to place the oil order on a Friday, that is the whole pitch.
Three Things Alissa Is Excited About
I asked her what has changed in her six years and where it is going. She named three.
Clear soy. It is one of the most prominently used oil types in the country, and RTI is rolling it out across all 40 depots this year. They are pre-selling in a lot of markets already, and Alissa said it is catching like wildfire. If you assumed oil is oil and there is no innovation left in it, that is exactly the assumption she wants to break.
The virtual technician. This one is my favorite, because it is a people problem solved with technology. Historically, when something went sideways, a technician got in a van and drove to the restaurant. But a lot of those calls were not broken equipment at all — they were a new hire who did not know how the system worked. Restaurants turn over a person or two a day. So RTI stood up a virtual technician team that gets online with the store and walks them through it in real time. No van, no wait. Alissa said it has been incredibly well received, and they are growing that side of the service model.
RTI Connect. This is the one operators will feel most. RTI already has a total oil management platform they call TOM, where customers can see filtering patterns and oil usage. RTI Connect pulls that together with invoicing, billing, filtering, and deliveries so an operator can click in once and see the entire partnership in one place. The goal, in her words, is for the experience with RTI to feel all encompassing and modern. It is actively in development.
Why One Size Fits All Never Works
There was a moment in this conversation where I brought up the one-size-fits-all sales approach and Alissa’s face turned before she could stop it. For those of you watching the video, you saw it. That reaction is the answer.
Their starting question with a brand is: can we meet you where you are on oil type? A proprietary blend, something already in their book, or a move to something more durable or more affordable. From there they will run a 90-day test — often at a location near a depot close to your home office — and they have installed in innovation kitchens so a culinary team can try an oil type on before committing. For big brands with a proprietary oil, RTI works with the brand’s supply chain team on procurement and simply distributes it through the system.
They have also had to get creative on footprint, because the back of house keeps shrinking. Gone are the big-box kitchens with room to stack JIBs and run oil carts. Alissa’s newer configuration is a water-heater-sized indoor tank paired with a secured outdoor tank. Even the commercial terms flex: build it into the oil price or into a program fee, whichever fits how you run your P&L.
And if you are an emerging brand wondering whether you are too small, they have a mid-market team alongside the national account team, plus an oil specialist Alissa describes as a genius — the self-proclaimed oil geek I have referenced on this show before.
A Million Pounds a Day, and Where It Goes Next
This is the part I did not expect to be the most interesting, and it was.
RTI delivers roughly 2.2 million pounds of fresh oil a day and picks up a little over one million pounds of used cooking oil a day. That used oil goes into a partnership with Phillips 66, which converts it to biodiesel used to offset traditional diesel and to feed sustainable aviation fuel. Alissa’s claim: RTI is the number one input into green diesel.
And because the system is closed loop, it is also one of the highest quality inputs. Their used oil does not carry the contaminants that end up in a traditional rendering tank. “Who would have ever thought used cooking oil could have quality measures?” she said. “We have great quality used cooking oil.”
I asked why leadership spends the time and money on this when the cheap path is to do it the way everybody else does. Her answer was the most honest thing in the episode. She wants a business she can go to bed at night knowing is good for people and planet — good for her own employees, good for the operators they serve, and good for the planet. In that order.
She also mentioned sitting on a Delta flight on her way to visit a depot, thinking about the fact that her company’s used fryer oil might be part of what got her there. That is a fun thing to carry to work.
How to Start a Conversation With Them
Start on the RTI website — there is a “want to learn more” link and their team responds fast. You can also find Alissa on LinkedIn, where she posts constantly. Her last name is two golf terms stuck together, which makes it easy to remember.
Her filter for whether this is for you is refreshingly simple: if you cook with oil and managing it drives you bonkers, you would probably benefit. And I will add the honest caveat I always add — this is an investment, it is not free. But when you run it as total cost of ownership against how you are doing it today, it tends to come out ahead. Alissa’s analogy landed for me: not many kitchens are washing dishes by hand anymore. They put in a dishwasher. Same idea.
Takeaways for Operators
- The oil in your fryer is an ingredient, not a supply. We obsess over protein and produce and then buy whatever is on the broadline truck. Oil type changes how your food tastes and how long it lasts. Treat it like a menu decision.
- Automating a task also removes a risk. The safety case here is strong enough that RTI’s customers see it in their insurance premiums. That is a real line item, not a soft benefit.
- Turnover is a technology problem. RTI built a virtual technician team because most of their service calls were training calls, not repairs. Go look at your own tickets and ask how many are broken equipment versus a new hire nobody showed.
- Ask a vendor what they will pilot. A 90-day test near your home office, or an install in your innovation kitchen, will tell you more than any reference call.
- A small footprint is not a disqualifier anymore. If you passed on outsourced oil years ago for lack of space, the configurations have changed. Ask again.
- Sustainability is often a byproduct of good operations. RTI is the number one input into green diesel because of how they engineered for safety, not because they set out to be green.
Alissa, congratulations on the new seat. With an operations background and a people background both, I think RTI is in good hands, and I appreciate you spending the time with us.
And to our listeners — thank you for showing up again this week. You have a lot of choices for how you spend your time, and the fact that you spend some of it with us never gets old. Make it a great day.
