Another concept McDonald's found very much worth exploring is the idea of becoming more holistic when it comes to designing energy efficient buildings. These are called TEEM restaurants for "The Energy Efficient McDonald's." There are now four TEEM restaurants--in Bay Point, Calif., Colorado Springs, Colo., Bensenville, Illinois and Buford, Ga., near Atlanta.
While the restaurants are very similar, each one has a different twist. For example, the Bay Point store has individual meters on all the major appliances, lighting and other energy-consuming devices. These include electric meters on the grills and fryer, as well as individual gas meters on the furnace and water heater.
PG&E is collecting data on the total energy usage of the appliances, breaking down power consumption and maximum demand for each system. That should help McDonald's figure out that electricity benchmark it needs for its franchisees.
The TEEM stores were an outgrowth of the "green architecture" movement of the early 1990s, as well as a partnership McDonald's entered into with the Environmental Defense Fund in 1991.
At the time, you'll recall, McDonald's was under heavy fire from environmental groups for using polystyrene foam clamshell packaging for its sandwiches as well as paper products bleached with chlorine. McDonald's also accused of generating too much waste, consuming too much energy, and not recycling enough.
The company was even blamed for causing the destruction of tropical rain forests by farmers clearing land to raise cattle for McDonald's hamburgers.
In 1991, the McDonald's-EDF partnership produced a list of 42 ways to reduce, reuse and recycle the solid waste generated by the restaurants. McDonald's also pledged to use more recycled products, and, by late 1997, "McRecycle USA" had purchased more than $2 billion worth of recycled products.
The partnership was a good experience for McDonald's, which had, for the first time, provided an outside group with confidential information about its restaurants. "I can't tell you how wonderful it was to work with experts in their field," Langert says. "Not that this has any direct bearing on energy, but what I'm leading up to was that we could invite in experts outsider of our business--even environmentalists. We had 10 different organizations come in--the concept was to bring in different points of view and have these people--in a very open fashion--challenge what we were doing."
In fact, the experience with EDF eventually prompted McDonald's to seek the expertise of the energy companies it now deals with, Langert says.
"Sophisticated energy management systems are not what we're interested in," Langert says.
We're interested in developing simple systems that are easily executed at the store level, and that can be repeated, time after time. We want something that's easy to understand and easy to train on. The energy management issues that we work on are not going to make sense, or live long, unless the owner-operators can understand them."