Sauce Pizza and Wine believes in cooking from scratch using artisanal flours, imported cheeses, and farm fresh vegetables. The Arizona restaurant chain brings together an artisanal Italian collection of delicious pastas, bruschetta appetizers, seasonal salads, “kid-famous” mac and cheese, paninis, and pizzas prepared and baked every day.
With 11 neighborhood eateries for fast casual dining and online ordering to bring Sauce home, its fresh concept has been the cure for every appetite, with updated Italian favorites paired with impressively affordable wines. As a result, the Sauce restaurants are attracting families, local kids’ soccer teams, vegetarians and gluten-free guests, as well as meatball lovers.
To maintain a warm inviting dining environment and lower energy costs, the restaurant chain recently converted its lighting to LEDs for all of its locations. Scott Kilpatrick, CEO and president of Sauce Pizza and Wine, said, “We wanted to reduce our electricity consumption, lower our maintenance costs, and maintain the control of light levels at each of our locations. The switch to LEDs enables us to meet those goals and allows us to concentrate on our food and our guests.”
Although Sauce locations range from 2,500 to 3,500 square feet, the “front of the house” contains the dining room and open kitchen, while the back of the restaurants include the dishwasher, equipment, and inventory. To find appropriate lighting for the restaurants, Sauce met with Don Bartelt, senior energy advisor for Energy Efficiency (EE) Pros, a specialty LED Lighting provider based in Scottsdale, AZ. EE Pros focuses on providing products and solutions for high-lighting volume applications.
After his assessment, Bartelt recommended Energy Star rated MR16 and BR30 EarthBulb LEDs from EarthTronics for the dining rooms. The six-watt, MR16 EarthBulb LED bulb provides 3000K color of light with a 38° beam angle, replacing the 50 watt halogen MR16 product being used. Designed for ideal use in dimming recessed lighting, track lighting, and display lighting applications, and this LED performs for 25,000 hours. The eight-watt, BR30 LED replaced 65 watt incandescent and is also is rated to last 25,000 hours and maintain the light levels to provide warm, comfortable restaurant atmosphere.
In the open kitchen area where guests can watch the chefs in action, seven-watt PAR20 and 17 watt PAR38 EarthBulb LED floodlights were selected and installed to optimize the visual experience. These PAR lamps render the entire visible spectrum, with a color rendering index of >90. The EarthBulb LED PAR20 and PAR38 lamps deliver 500 and 1200 lumens, last 25,000 hours and save over 80% in energy cost providing an ideal replacement for 50 and 120 watt incandescent and halogen floodlights. The LED PAR lamps are designed with the same form factor and beam pattern as the PAR lamps that they are replacing. These feature a durable lightweight plastic design with an integral aluminum cooling system to reduce stress on fixture components.
In Sauce’s “back of the house,” linear T8 LED tubes from EarthTronics replaced existing fluorescent tubes. These Design Light Consortium (DLC)-listed bulbs feature nearly 50% energy savings and a glass tube construction that ensures proper system cooling to support high lumen maintenance over the 50,000 hour rated life of the product.
“The conversion to LEDs reduced energy consumption by 80 percent overall, as well as maintenance time and costs,” said Bartelt. “That’s a lot of pizzas.”