Vishal Patel thinks a lot about the invisible costs that sneak into a restaurant’s bottom line. As the senior manager of energy engineering at Butterfly Equity, a private equity firm investing in food and energy efficiency, Patel is focused on a growing problem almost nobody in the industry is talking about: airflow imbalance in commercial kitchens, especially in quick-service restaurants (QSRs).
Ask anyone in the industry about energy savings, and you’ll hear talk about LED lighting, smart thermostats, or solar panels. But Patel and Budderfly, the energy efficiency-as-a-service company backed by Butterfly Equity, keep coming back to something much simpler, and much more neglected: the air itself. “The biggest gains in commercial buildings are hiding in airflow, which no one is measuring,” Patel says.
The Blind Spot: Air Imbalance in Kitchens
Most QSR kitchens are a patchwork of upgrades and fixes. Over the years, new fryers, ovens, and holding equipment have been added with little thought to how much more heat the kitchen is pumping out. The HVAC system, meanwhile, is usually an afterthought, left to do a job it was never sized for. It’s a setup that almost guarantees trouble.
Here’s the cycle: As the kitchen heats up, operators crank up the rooftop unit, often flipping it to recirculation mode to keep the dining area cool. It works – for a day or two. But that “fix” is masking a growing problem. Without enough fresh air, the kitchen drifts into negative pressure. Exhaust hoods keep pulling air out, but nothing replaces it. Conditioned air gets sucked out the door, equipment strains, and energy bills creep up.
Patel and Budderfly call this the “hidden leak” – a loss that adds up, shift after shift, across thousands of restaurants.
Real Data, Real Losses
When Budderfly started measuring airflow at scale, the numbers were staggering. In a study covering more than 250 QSR locations across dozens of brands, they found that 91% of sites were running imbalanced. Half of the makeup air units weren’t working at all. The median imbalance? Nearly 2,000 cubic feet per minute – enough to make doors hard to open and push cooled air straight up the exhaust flue.
What’s worse, there’s no industry standard for monitoring this. Codes check balance at commissioning, maybe once, but nobody tracks it year after year as equipment wears down and kitchens evolve. “If you don’t measure it, it’s impossible to fix it at scale,” Patel says.
The Budderfly Approach: Continuous Balance, Not Just Comfort
Budderfly’s answer is both simple and smart: treat kitchen airflow like you’d treat your health with a smartwatch. Every system they install comes with pressure sensors and remote diagnostics, constantly tracking how much air is coming in, how much is going out, and how well the system is holding up. Instead of treating “test and balance” as a one-time commissioning event, it’s baked into the daily routine.
This isn’t just about gadgets. The company replaces old rooftop and makeup air units with high-performance, all-electric dedicated outside air systems (DOAS) and energy recovery ventilators. These units are tailored to each restaurant’s real heat load – not the one it had years ago. By zoning dining and kitchen areas, and by using variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems, Budderfly can keep both comfort and balance in check, without sacrificing either.
Patel is especially bullish on electrification and decarbonization. Budderfly’s ultra high-performance systems cut carbon, cut cost, and eliminate the airflow imbalances that quietly drain money from restaurant chains.
Scaling Smarter, Not Just Harder
Patel’s vision is bigger than any one kitchen. “If you add up all the energy wasted by air imbalance in QSRs, it’s like running a power plant just to make up for what’s leaking out,” he says. By measuring, tracking, and adjusting in real time, Budderfly is building a model that can be scaled across thousands of sites.
And as kitchens get smarter, the data they generate will feed back into AI-powered analytics, finding new ways to optimize energy use and spot problems before they turn into breakdowns.
The Bottom Line
For QSR operators, the message is clear: if you’re only focused on comfort, you’re missing the hidden costs of imbalance. The real solution is to design for both comfort and balance from the start – and to keep measuring, long after the system is installed.
With new technology and a smarter approach, the airflow leak in America’s kitchens doesn’t have to be an invisible drain any longer.
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