The Full Overhead Audit: What Cap Energy and OneSource Find When You Run Both

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Food and labor get the annual audit. Energy and technology spend usually don't, and on a restaurant P&L that thin, that's a mistake.

The National Restaurant Association pegs the typical pre-pandemic restaurant's pre-tax profit margin at around 5% of sales. Food and labor each ran about 33 cents of every dollar, and utilities, occupancy, supplies, admin, maintenance, and card processing fees combined for close to 29% of sales on top of that. Input costs have climbed roughly 30% industry-wide since 2019, which means that 29% slice has almost certainly grown. Two pieces of it, energy and technology/telecom spend, are also two of the more controllable costs on that list. Most enterprise operators just haven't run the audit.

What Cap Energy finds

Cap Energy monitors energy at the appliance level: broilers, blast chillers, walk-ins, and the rest of the line, tracked individually instead of estimated from one monthly utility bill. Across its customer base, 98.3% of sites save between 10% and 20% of prior energy consumption within 12 months of installing the monitors. Multi-unit operator Mission Mars measured a 25% reduction at one site and 23% at another after rollout, according to Cap Energy's case study.

That savings matters more in a restaurant than almost anywhere else. The EPA's ENERGY STAR program for restaurants estimates that restaurants use five to seven times more energy per square foot than other commercial buildings, with high-volume quick-service locations running up to ten times higher. ENERGY STAR also notes that cutting energy costs by 20% can raise restaurant profit by as much as a third, since the savings drop straight to a margin this thin.

What OneSource finds

OneSource runs the same kind of audit on the technology and telecom side. Its Technology Expense Management practice reviews the phone, mobile, network, and cloud contracts that accumulate across a growing footprint, and reports a 30% average client savings and a 99% client retention rate across more than 25 years in the business. For food service operators specifically, OneSource points to a familiar pattern: PCI DSS compliance obligations, mobile devices to track, and network reliability that has to hold at every location, not just the flagship. None of that shows up as one line item. It shows up as a dozen small overages that compound across a portfolio.

Why the combination is the bigger story

Run both audits together and the case is stronger than either vendor makes alone. Cap Energy addresses utility spend, one of the largest and most energy-intensive costs a restaurant carries. OneSource addresses the technology and telecom spend layered on top of it. Paired, they cover two of the cost categories inside that 29%-of-sales bucket the NRA tracks, without touching food or labor at all.

The numbers, side by side:

Cap Energy: 10 to 20% average site-level energy savings within 12 months (source)
Restaurants use 5 to 7x more energy per square foot than other commercial buildings, up to 10x for high-volume QSRs (ENERGY STAR)
OneSource: 30% average technology/telecom spend savings, 99% client retention (source)
Utilities, occupancy, supplies, admin, maintenance, and card fees: ~29% of sales for a typical restaurant (National Restaurant Association)

If you're running more than a handful of units and haven't had an energy or technology expense audit in the last year, that's the conversation worth having first. Schedule a consultation with OGC to see whether Cap Energy, OneSource, or both make sense for your stack, or browse OGC's full vendor portfolio to see what else is already vetted.

Sources