RON CARDWELL: RTI / THE GREAT SEED OIL DEBATE

About this episode

Ron Cardwell discusses the complexities of cooking oil management and the ongoing seed oil debate.

Ron Cardwell, Director of Commodity Strategy at Restaurant Technologies (RTI), runs point on cooking oil for the company that pioneered automated oil management — the closed-loop system that delivers fresh oil and pulls used oil out of more than 40,000 restaurants. We get into the seed oil debate, allergen myths, beef tallow's comeback, and what actually happens to the used oil in your fryer. Ron's nickname is "The Oil Nerd." He earned it. He started in soybean processing out of college, fell in love with how oil touches every corner of food and energy, and has been deep in commodity strategy ever since. RTI moves more than 700 million pounds of fresh oil into restaurants every year and pulls hundreds of millions of pounds of used oil back out — and almost all of it ends up as renewable diesel, biodiesel, or sustainable aviation fuel. We dig into how operators should actually think about oil — flavor, function, and price, in that order, not the other way around. Why "buy the cheapest" is a trap that costs you more in turnover and bad food. The seed oil vs. beef tallow debate — what's signal and what's noise, what the real trade-offs are on flavor, supply, and price when you…

People in this episode

Host: Jeff Fell

Guest: Ron Cardwell

Topics covered

• seed oil debate
• cooking oil management
• food allergens
• beef tallow
• oil flavor and function
• renewable diesel

Keywords

• cooking oil
• oil management
• food allergens
• beef tallow
• seed oil
• renewable energy
• restaurant operations

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Restaurant Technologies

Products: beef tallow, seed oil, high-oleic crop

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