NRM Success Story
Colony Foods
Lawrence, MA
Colony Foods not only greatly improved the efficiency of their refrigeration system, but they also gained capabilities to better manage its operation. NRM provided a full-service solution they now can't live without.
What They Needed
Colony Foods is a wholesale and food distribution company in Lawrence, Massachusetts that takes its commitment to providing the best products possible very seriously. A local company that’s been serving other independent businesses in their area like pizza shops and delis for over 35 years, they’re continually looking for ways to ensure their operations are able to meet the expanding needs of their customers.
With the foodservice industry continuing to be more frozen food-based, Colony Foods’ massive amount of refrigerated warehouse space (over 30,000 SQ. FT.) becomes more important than ever. And with so many other businesses relying on them, keeping their refrigeration running optimally, as well as their food product safe at all times, is something just as important has having deliveries on time and the right products in stock.
Colony Foods is not in a position where they can afford to lose an entire warehouse of food due to a refrigeration issue that could‘ve been prevented.
WHAT NRM PROVIDED
As a participating vendor in the Mass Saves program, NRM was able to help Colony Foods optimize the entirety of their refrigerated facility while securing for them a generous incentive from their utility provider to implement the upgrades. This made it a no-brainer to do because it meant the upgrades would positively impact their bottom line immediately.
For the operational upgrades, NRM implemented proven smart thermostatic controls that drastically decrease how much energy the refrigeration system consumes without sacrificing temperature. Instead of the majority of the equipment in the system running at 100% capacity every second of every day, most components now only run when they’re required to in order to satisfy space temperatures.
Most importantly, NRM armed them with a state-of-the-art monitoring platform to prevent costly system issues. This provides the facilities management team a wealth of operational info to stay ahead of potential issues. They have access to the dashboard on any device that has internet. Real-time temperatures, live and historical runtime data, amperage data—and much more—make it easy to see if something is wrong.
NRM also modernized Colony Foods’ defrost capabilities to give them the ability to instantly initiate a defrost on their evaporator coils whenever they spot ice building up—no longer do they need to wait on an emergency maintenance call just for an iced coil.
Industry
Distribution & Wholesale
Location
Lawrence, MA
Implemented Measures
- CoolTrol® refrigeration controls
- Remote Site Manager
- Smart Electric Defrost
- Actionable Alerts
Annual Energy Savings
279,500 kWh
Annual Dollar Savings
$40,500
"NRM’s state-of-the-art system provides not only efficiencies for the company, it’s also showing us exactly what’s going on under this roof. The facility is broken up into zones so everything at this company is monitored 24/7, 365 days a year. If we do experience an issue, we have access to a 24-hour tech. support line to help us determine what the problems are. I get a notification, and so do the owners and our refrigeration technician so we can take care of the problem spot on."
— George, Facilities Manager, Colony Foods
Avoid food safety crises with a wealth of operational data and proactive insights
Whether you have 1 cold space in a single school kitchen, or 100 cold spaces spread across an entire district, our live summary page gives you an immediate overview of all your cooling activity.
Quickly consult current and 7-day runtimes, cooling status, temperature settings, and address any alarms that have been triggered.
Consider the amount of time and effort you’d save by having critical operational info all conveniently in one place.
Arm yourself with powerful and unique visual diagnostics graphs to pinpoint exactly when and where an operating issue arises. Troubleshooting becomes more efficient and effective, helping to ensure the issue is resolved on the first technician visit.
The graphs show important but often overlooked components such as amperages, compressor cycles, the solenoid valve, and things like whether a door is open or not.
The monitoring platform offers transparent runtime and temperature data that provide the measurement and verification proof for accurate recordkeeping.
These graphs also allow you to actually see how much less energy your refrigeration system is using. While also tracking that safe temperatures are always met.
Store up to 10 years of operational logs that take the human-error component out of tracking temperatures.
Going beyond a high temperature alert — which occurs only after an issue has already disrupted operations — NRM’s platform provides a suite of early detection notifications to help you be more proactive with troubleshooting.
For example, a compressor that’s short cycling will still likely be able to cool the space, but it’s dangerous, unnoticed overuse could lead to a critical system failure, jeopardizing the entire cooler’s worth of food.