This Las Vegas company helps restaurants save money on cooking oil

A gallon of cooking oil currently costs more than a gallon of gasoline, making fryers in commercial kitchens costly to operate.

Filta Environmental Kitchen Solutions can cut those costs through its fryer management service that includes on-site microfiltration as well as the removal and replacement of cooking oil.

The company ultimately recycles thousands of pounds of used cooking oil into low-pollutant biodiesel.

A typical 50-pound fryer takes about a box and a half of fresh oil to fill up, and oil costs about $50 a box, said Lauren Wanco, owner of the Filta franchise in Las Vegas.

“So every time you dump it and have to fill up that fryer again, it’s $75,” she said. “For our service, we come in and we actually filter that cooking oil, so rather than discarding it, we can do microfiltration that extends the life of the oil and saves our customers money.

“In fact, it usually saves so much money that it offsets our costs, and we become a net zero cost.”

Filta services the CasaBlanca and Virgin River casinos in Mesquite, as well as Bishop Gorman High School, UNLV, Mandalay Bay Events Center, Johnny Mac’s Sports Bar &Grill, the Renaissance and Westin hotels, and the Raiders’ Henderson headquarters at the Intermountain Health Performance Center, among others.

Wanco said the casinos in Mesquite were dumping 22 fryers every day before hiring Filta to service them.

“So obviously it was very costly to do that,” she said. “When they brought us on board, we were able to filter their fryers now at about a 70 percent rate, so we’re presenting significant savings.”

Wanco said the majority of her customers pay about 80 cents per pound, or about $40 to service a 50-pound fryer.

Chris Bulen, corporate executive chef for Honest Hospitality, which manages the culinary and sports nutrition program for the Raiders at their practice facility, has used Filta for years.

“So when we were engaged to do the food programming for the Raiders, we kind of already knew who we wanted to go with, just from having a good experience and no issues with service or products,” he said. “Obviously, with the players and coaches being the main service point for us, the amount of fried food we do here is generally low, for health reasons. Sometimes we do have higher days.”

Bulen said Filta still services their fryers up to three times a week, straining, purifying and replacing their oil as needed.

“They don’t just come here to replace oil and to sell more product and give me a higher bill,” he said. “They actually do care about providing a better service, saying that the oil is still good, using their high-quality products and getting more life out of it.”

Greener, safer, cleaner

The mobile microfiltration system, known as FiltaFry, was invented in 1996 by Jason Sayers in Great Britain after a close friend suffered a severe cooking oil-related burn in a commercial kitchen. He realized there needed to be a better way to clean commercial deep fryers and handle boiling oil.

Filta’s mission to make commercial kitchens “faster, greener, safer and cleaner” has grown into a global network of more than 350 franchise owners, including about 120 in the United States.

Wanco, a classically trained chef with a degree in nutrition science, used Filta as a customer before buying the Las Vegas franchise with her husband in 2017.

“I brought Filta on as a vendor because I loved the value proposition that they were presenting, but also for the safety features that they presented,” she said. “Because if you were to go and clean the fryer on your own, which I’ve done many times in the past, you have to dump the fryer. You’ve got to get rid of the oil and carry it out to a big stinky oil bin outside.

“If you don’t have the proper equipment, burns happen and you could slip and fall. I brought Filta on because I just loved that somebody else was handling a very dangerous aspect of our kitchen cleaning.”

The company also offers comprehensive commercial kitchen cleaning.

“We’re cleaning equipment, ceilings, floors, walls. We do hood exhaust cleaning,” Wanco said. “We really try to be a one-stop shop for our customers so that they’re paying one bill, because those tend to be the pain points and the headaches of most commercial kitchens.”

Second life

Wanco said the goal is always to filter the oil.

“Sometimes we’re able to filter it more than once,” she said. “We have a proprietary machine that does microfiltration. We’ll pull out the oil from the fryer, which is usually 350 degrees when we’re operating on it. It’ll cycle through our filtration machine, and while it’s filtering, we actually deep clean the fryer.

“So we’re vacuuming out any crumbs or particles that might be in the fryer, tips of chicken wings that have broken off and breading, we scrub it up, and then we put that filtered oil back in the fryer.”

The mobile filtering unit has two lances — one that pulls out the oil and one that dispenses the oil. When the oil is no longer filterable, Filta collects it and stores it until it’s ready to be transferred to a refinery where it’s converted into biodiesel, a clean fuel that can be used in diesel-powered vehicles and more.

“It’s all a fully enclosed system. From the moment we pull it from the fryer, it never has to touch soil,” Wanco said. “We collect all of our oil at the end of its shelf life from every restaurant and commercial kitchen and then we store it at our warehouse.

“Every time we fill up our 6,000 gallons of waste oil storage, an oil tanker will pull up to take that oil, and then they recycle it into biodiesel.”

Filta (gofilta.com) has recycled 1.1 billion pounds of used cooking oil into biodiesel and other renewable energy sources since entering the U.S. market in 2002, according to the company. Every gallon of biodiesel produced from recycled cooking oil prevents 16 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. The company has created enough biodiesel to offset a total carbon dioxide equivalent of planting more than 135 million trees.

Wanco said her Filta franchise in Las Vegas has recycled 420,000 gallons of cooking oil into biodiesel since 2017.

Many U.S. sports stadiums use Filta for cooking oil filtration and recycling, including Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons.

Wanco hopes to add Allegiant Stadium to that list and make Silver and Black game days greener.

“It’s not a customer of ours yet, but we’re actively pursuing it,” she said. “They have 120 fryers, and if they had to dump them after every single game, that’s very costly for them. A service like ours presents significant value.”

Contact reporter Todd Dewey at [email protected]. Follow @tdewey33 on X.