For restaurants, water is a crucial resource, but using tap water could be costing owners more than they think.
Beyond the potential to disrupt the taste of water-based beverages delivered to customers, tap water can cost a restaurant long-term with the damage contaminants can do to the longevity of equipment.
Here, Bob Freeborn, head of technical operations at HANS Premium Water, explains how tap water hurts restaurants’ bottom lines and what they can do instead.
1. Why is tap water inadequate?
Most tap water contains chlorine, and when you make coffee, when you make tea, or any soft drinks, the chlorine adds bitterness to the flavor of the drink.
A water filtration device removes chlorine from the water.
Another thing people might not think of is if you remove all the alkalinity from the water, you’ll have cleaner, clearer ice, and longer-lasting carbonated drinks. Additionally, those chemicals can build up in machinery over time, meaning restaurants have to have them serviced more often.
2. What can restaurants do to improve water quality?
Restaurants can use a HANS Premium Water Appliance to strip out up to 99.9 percent of all contaminants from the water and add calcium and alkalinity back just to give it extra taste so water isn’t flat. Adding minerals back to the water also ensures it isn’t corrosive.
3. What are some cost saving measures a water filtration system delivers?
The economic rationale is that, number one, we’ve found restaurants can cut staff whose job it is to polish glassware, silverware, and dishes to get rid of scale formed from using bad water. Number two, dishwashing machines and anything else that uses water as a foundation does not have to be cleaned as regularly, and you will have longer-lasting equipment.
Additionally, in hot cities, restaurants typically use misters in outdoor seating areas. If you have hard water, it will scale those up and plug the tips. Those systems are very expensive to replace. By using reverse osmosis water, it keeps it clean, you get better dispersion of water, and better cooling potential.
Bob Freeborn is a water expert focused on whole house/facility reverse osmosis water purification systems. Freeborn has more than 35 years of experience and is the Head of Technical Operations at HANS Premium Water.
