Free Fryer Oil Pickup for Restaurants

Cooking oil pickup is free for the vast majority of kitchens we serve. There is no invoice for the collection, the container, the manifest, or the record retention, and there is no minimum volume, setup fee, fuel surcharge, or contract. It is free because the oil is a commodity: it becomes feedstock for biodiesel and renewable diesel, and we are paid for it rather than by you. An off-cycle stop on a scheduled account is free as well. The only work we quote a price for is grease trap cleaning and a spill that needs containment and cleanup labor rather than a hose, and in both cases the number is given before anyone is dispatched.

Your first stop runs 3 to 5 business days from the day you call. That window covers the sizing conversation, container delivery and placement, and route assignment. Phones are answered 24/7 by a real person, and a form submission gets a callback the same business day. If you are in an actual bind, an overflowing container from a hauler who stopped showing up, say so on the call and it gets triaged as an emergency overflow instead of a normal signup. There is no paperwork to sign, no deposit, and nothing to install.

Yes. In California, CDFA classifies both as inedible kitchen grease, so they are one regulated stream. Deep fryers, flat-top griddles, woks, and pressure fryers all drain into the same container and leave on the same stop. There is no need to sort by fryer type, oil age, or whether it has already been through your filter. What has to stay out is water, degreaser, and boil-out solution, because that contamination devalues the load and can get it rejected at the receiving facility. Boil-out water follows your local FOG rules instead.

Run the arithmetic before anyone guesses. Take each vat capacity in pounds, divide by 7.6 for gallons, and multiply by how many times a week that vat gets dumped. Two 50 lb fryers changed weekly is roughly 13 gallons a week, which a 70-gallon outdoor container holds comfortably on a monthly stop. Four 40 lb fryers on a four-day cycle is roughly 37 gallons a week, near 160 a month, which is a 200-gallon container. Six 50 lb fryers on a two-day fried chicken cycle is roughly 138 gallons a week, past what any single container holds for a month, so that site goes weekly instead. Sizes run 45 and 60 gallons indoors and 70 to 200 gallons outdoors. If the first size is wrong, we swap it at no charge with no penalty and no re-quote.

The driver calls your site first to try to solve it on the spot, whether the blocker is a locked gate, a delivery truck parked across the approach, or a contractor who fenced the area that morning. If nobody can be reached, the attempt is logged as an access issue and dispatch contacts you to reschedule for the next available slot. We would rather fix the cause than keep rescheduling, so during onboarding we settle on a reliable access method, a gate code, a lockbox, or a placement reachable from the street. If access fails twice for the same reason, we will push to move the container or change the method, because repeated misses are how a container becomes an overflow.

Yes, and this is a large share of what we do. Every site rolls up into one dashboard with one point of contact, whether the portfolio sits inside one county or spans all six of our markets, from Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Inland Empire to the San Francisco Bay Area and Tacoma. Each location keeps its own container, its own interval, and its own route assignment, because a 45-gallon cafe and a 200-gallon fry house should never share a schedule. Compliance reporting is consolidated, so a franchisor audit or a corporate sustainability request is answered from one export rather than a dozen vendor relationships. Adding a location takes about two minutes: the address, the fryer count, and a preferred day.

Standard routes run Monday through Saturday, and most stops land on weekday mornings before the kitchen gets busy. We do not run standard routes on Sundays or major holidays, but the emergency line is answered every day of the year by a real person, holidays included. Being answered is not the same as being dispatched instantly, and fewer trucks run on a holiday, so dispatch will be straight with you on the phone about what that day can actually do rather than let you plan a dinner service around a truck that is not coming. If a holiday week is going to spike your volume, tell us in advance and we tighten the interval around it.

Usually, and you do not have to be free of the old agreement to get on our schedule. Check the renewal clause first, because grease agreements often auto-renew and require written notice inside a fixed window before the anniversary date, commonly 30 to 90 days. Send that notice in writing and keep a copy. Your incumbent owns its container and has to collect it, so there is often a few-day gap in the handoff, and we would rather place ours early and let a restaurant run two containers briefly than leave the kitchen with nowhere to drain a fryer. Your old manifests stay your records, and the retention clock runs on the pickups, not on the vendor, so hold onto the file rather than handing it back.

Small residue around the fill collar is normal and gets wiped at every stop. For a larger spill, from an overfilled container, a cracked drum, or a tipped caddy, do not rinse it toward a storm drain, which is an environmental violation in California. Contain it with absorbent material such as oil-dry pads or cat litter, keep foot traffic off the area so it does not track into the kitchen or become a slip hazard, and call the emergency line. Spill calls are triaged ahead of routine stops, and the container gets pumped, the area cleaned, and damaged equipment replaced. A pump-out is free on a scheduled account, and if the job needs containment and cleanup labor, that number is quoted on the call before anyone is dispatched.

Yes, and the service is identical. The same locked container, scheduled interval, and digital CDFA manifest cover ghost kitchens, hotel and resort outlets, commissary and shared-kitchen buildings, casino dining, stadium concessions, school and university dining, hospital food service, grocery delis, food trucks, and multi-unit restaurant groups. What changes between them is the arithmetic, not the process: a stadium fries in surges tied to an event calendar, a hotel spreads volume across outlets and banquets, a commissary aggregates several businesses behind one roll-up door. We size and schedule from the fryers in the building, not from the sign on it.