Au Bon Pain – Jana Holt – 2012

Goals

Jana Holt was enlisted to evaluate energy efficiency opportunities for Au Bon Pain, a café and bakery chain with over 280 locations worldwide. She targeted four in New England to help the company understand efficiency opportunities across its entire café portfolio.

Solutions

By conducting a series of energy audits, Holt identified opportunities to upgrade lighting and optimize HVAC settings. Additionally, because ENERGY STAR-certified models of much of the kitchen equipment Au Bon Pain uses are not available, she also identified more efficient refrigerated display case models for potential refrigeration upgrades.

Potential Impact

In total, Holt’s projects could save the four cafés more than $90,000 over the project lifetimes, as well as more than 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year. If implemented at 50 priority cafes, Au Bon Pain could save more than $1.2 million over the project lifetimes, as well as over 2.7 million kilowatt hours – an average electricity reduction of 23 percent per café – and 1400 metric tons of carbon dioxide  every year.