Diego Vega & Rory at Rye Energy, The Hidden Cost That's Eating Your Margins

<p>Energy is the line on the P&amp;L that nobody owns and everybody pays for. </p><p>In this episode, Chris sits down with Diego Vega, Founder and CEO of Rye Energy, and is later joined by Rory, Head of Operations and ex-chef, to crack open a category most operators have been forced to ignore.</p><p>Why this conversation matters</p><p>Hospitality consumes three to four times more electricity per square foot than the average business. A coffee shop, per square foot, burns more energy than a petrol station. And yet, energy procurement remains one of the most opaque, broker-led, deliberately complex purchases an operator makes. </p><p>Diego compares it to where payments sat five years ago, before Dojo and the new wave of providers pulled back the curtain. Rye is doing the same for multi-utilities.</p><p>What Rye actually does</p><p>Rye is a platform that unifies data and contract terms across electricity, gas, water (and soon waste) for multi-site operators. Three core jobs: procurement, real-time monitoring via meter data, and bill validation. </p><p>It benchmarks your sites against each other (Manchester vs Leeds vs London) and against sector peers, so you finally know what good looks like.</p><p>The 40% problem</p><p>Only 40% of your energy bill is the actual commodity. The rest is non-commodity transmission costs, levies and fees financing the renewable transition. </p><p>Lock in the best unit rate you like; the hidden cost stack is where margins quietly disappear. The cheapest kilowatt hour is the one you don&#39;t use, and reducing usage compounds savings because it pulls down the non-commodity charges too.</p><p>The surprise finding from 100+ live sites</p><p>Diego went in expecting efficiency to be the headline win. It wasn&#39;t. The bigger unlock has been growth. Operators trying to open 5, 10, 17 sites a year keep getting stuck on single-phase to three-phase upgrades, undersized meters, and MEP plans that don&#39;t match the kitchen they&#39;re trying to run. </p><p>Nobody on the team owns this, and a £50k landlord capex contribution rarely covers it. Rye is quietly removing that drag on growth pipelines.</p><p>Rory on what operators get wrong</p><p>After eight years in energy and a previous life in kitchens, Rory has seen the patterns. The biggest culprits:</p><p>HVAC and extraction systems left running on poorly configured timers, sucking money overnight. Defrost cycles spiking load profiles at 3am for no operational reason. Sites moving in and f