The Southwest Florida Water Management District’s Water Program for Restaurant Outreach (Water PRO) is off to a great start thanks to support from dozens of area Beef O’ Brady’s restaurants.
Water PRO is a free program that helps restaurants conserve water by educating staff and customers. By implementing Water PRO, the restaurant management agrees to only serve water upon request, display water conservation materials on tables, conduct self-audits and train staff.
The program, which began this May, is a big hit with several Beef O’ Brady’s franchises within the District.
Debbie Ferris, a project manager with the Beef O’ Brady’s corporate office in Tampa, learned about the water conservation program through a television news story and called Robin Grantham, the District’s Water PRO coordinator.
“The corporate office is very enthusiastic about the program and is encouraging their franchisees to sign up,” said Grantham.
In addition to promoting the program to their franchisees, Beef O’ Brady’s home office has also asked Grantham to provide a weekly article for their newsletter “Beef’s Bites.” The articles include water conservation tips and information on how franchisees can become a Water PRO. So far more than half of the 62 franchises within the District have joined Water PRO.
“At Beef O’Brady’s, we are always looking for ways to conserve and give back to the community,” said Ferris. “This conservation program helps us conserve and educate our customers. We also suggest many other ways for our franchises to conserve, such as using fluorescent lights, maintaining temperatures with programmable thermostats and staggering times to turn on equipment.”
As part of the program, the District will supply free educational materials to participating restaurants, including children’s coloring sheets, table materials and coasters. The District will also provide the restaurants with self-audit checklists and educational workshops on additional ways to save water.
Some of the ways restaurants can save water are by installing low-volume faucets and toilets in bathrooms and by making other simple retrofits, including replacing spray nozzles with sink aerators and reducing the flow in dripper wells and continuous flow faucets next to ice cream and butter scoop troughs.
For more information about the District’s Water PRO, please contact Robin Grantham at 1-800-423-1476, ext. 4782.