If They Went Head to Head in a Competition... Would Magnesol® or FreshFry Pods Come Out on Top?
There are a ton of oil filtration options on the market, and one popular option that restaurants have been using is Magnesol®.
Magnesol® is a white powder compound that removes and dissolves impurities from used oil to extend it's life and quality. We have a lot of customers who ask us if and why FreshFry Pods are better than Magnesol®, so we're taking an in-depth look at comparing employee training and compliance, price, safety, and overall oil filtration quality.
Employee Training
One of the major differences between using Magnesol® and FreshFry Pods is that using Magnesol® is more complex. Filtering with Magnesol® is much more labor intensive and time consuming that using Pods. With Magnesol®, employees must:
- Sprinkle Magnesol® over filter paper.
- Drain the oil from fryer into the filter pan.
- Allow oil to recirculate for 5-7 minutes.
- Clean fryer out. Return the filtered oil to the vat.
- Discard filter paper and Magnesol® residue.
With FreshFry Pods, employees simply need to:
- Drop a Pod into the hot oil of each fryer at the end of a night shift.
- In the morning, warm up the oil and take the Pods out of the fryers.
- Squeeze excess oil out of each Pod and discard into the trash.
The Pod works overnight to filter out oil impurities. There's no need to sit and wait for the Pod to filter the oil. It's so much easier for employees to remember - especially new employees who haven't ever filtered oil before.
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Employee Compliance
The tricky thing about Magnesol® is that if employees are not 100% compliant with using it properly for filtration, it has the potential to do more damage to your oil than good. Magnesol® has to be used consistently in order to work properly and extend the quality and life of oil. Skipping days of Magnesol® use can mean throwing out your oil entirely in some cases. If an operator skips days without Magnesol® use and then tries to 'reclaim' their bad oil, the Magnesol® can react with the degradation products (primarily free fatty acid, FFA) to create soaps (or metal soaps). The resultant soap could make the fryer foam over causing a safety hazard and/or can cause the oil to degrade at a much faster rate than usual - causing the operator to dump the oil. Soap also causes food to taste like a 'chemical.'
FreshFry Pods, however, do not negatively affect oil quality if employees forget to drop pods in the fryer overnight. Pods do work best when employees are 100% compliant, but there are no detrimental affects to the oil should employees forget this nightly chore.
In a recent trial, we find that employees are 43% compliant with Magnesol®, and 73% compliant with FreshFry Pods. One of the reasons compliance goes up when using Pods is because of the accountability factor.
Morning shift employees can see if Pods were used during the night shift because the morning crews has to take the Pod out of the fryer. There's no clear way to hold people accountable for using Magnesol® because it absorbs into the oil. It's not visible like Pods.
This difference makes a major impact on employee compliance when they can be held accountable for completing all nightly chores.
Safety
When employees work with Magnesol®, there is an inherent risk when moving and draining hot oil. Any time oil is moved, the risk of splatter goes up. Oil splatter can cause serious burns, which can harm your employees and increase the risk of lawsuits.
FreshFry Pods eliminate safety hazards because there's no need to move the oil. Employees simply drop a Pod into the oil at the end of a night shift, and the morning shift employees take it out of the warm oil in the morning. Should the oil be too warm when the employee goes to pull out the Pod, they can simply eliminate the step of squeezing out the excess oil and instead throw the Pod into the trash.
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Price
Dollar for dollar, FreshFry Pods cost about the same as Magnesol®. But if your store, like the vast majority of restaurants, isn't 100% compliant with Magnesol®, you'll likely be spending 10x more money on oil, filtration, and labor than you would if you switched to FreshFry Pods.
We've found that on average, restaurants are only compliant with Magnesol® 25% of the time - which means they're wasting valuable dollars on shelf tech they never use. We have a "No ShelfTech Guarantee." Because Pods are so effective and easy to use, they don't take up space on your shelf collecting dust.
Oil Filtration Quality
For years, Magnesol® has promised to provide a 50% oil life extension - but again, that's only if employees are 100% compliant. If your store is only 25% compliant, you miss out on 75% of oil extension, cost savings, and food quality. If you filter your oil twice a day with Magnesol®, it will last longer than using FreshFry Pods. But if you're not filtering twice a day every day, if you don't have the time to do so, if you don't have the staff training in place, then FreshFy Pods win every time. Pods massively reduce filtration time and labor. We've seen in all of our trials that compliance skyrockets because Pods are so simple to use, and significantly less complicated than filtering with Magnesol®.
"I actually wanted to use Magnesol®, I knew it worked, but because of how difficult it was to execute properly, it wasn't working at all. That's how I got the idea for Pods." - Jeremiah Chapman
It's like owning a treadmill - it will help you lose weight if you're willing to run on it for 20 minutes everyday, but if not, it ends up being used as a coatrack and takes up space in your living room.
People are much more likely to do something that's easy. Would you rather spend 20 minutes draining your fryer, laying down filter paper and powder, scrubbing your fryer vats, and filling them back up... or would you rather drop a Pod into the fryer at the end of the night?
Grab a case of Pods and see the difference for yourself!
