Restaurant Technologies promoted chief operating officer Alissa Partee to president and chief executive effective July 1, capping a multiyear succession process and handing one of the largest single sources of used cooking oil in the country to an operator with an energy private equity firm behind her.
Partee succeeds Jeff Kiesel, who ran RTI since 2005 and moves to non-executive chairman. She joined in 2020 as chief people officer and became COO in 2024, where she built a nine-member operations excellence team.
The ownership detail is the one our industry should sit with. In 2022, RTI moved from Goldman Sachs Asset Management to Energy Capital Partners, an energy infrastructure investor. Kiesel and Partee both helped lead that transition.
RTI now serves more than 45,000 customers with over 1,200 employees out of 41 depots across the lower 48.
The model matters as much as the scale. RTI installs a two-tank closed-loop system at the restaurant. Fresh oil fills one tank, spent oil drains from the fryer into the other, and a single truck stop drops fresh and pulls waste. The tanks are instrumented and report levels back to headquarters several times a day, so trucks route against days on hand rather than a standing order.
Speaking this month on the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Partee said RTI delivers roughly 2.2 million pounds of fresh oil per day and collects a little over one million pounds of used cooking oil per day. She put RTI's reach at about 12% of US restaurants.
That used oil moves through a partnership with Phillips 66, which converts it into biodiesel and feeds sustainable aviation fuel. Partee claimed RTI is the number one input into green diesel.
She also made a feedstock quality argument collectors should take seriously. Because the oil never sits in an open outdoor tank, she said it avoids the contamination that shows up in conventional rendering collection.
"Who would have ever thought used cooking oil could have quality measures?" she said. "We have great quality used cooking oil."
Her stated near-term priorities are all restaurant-facing. A clear soy rollout across every depot this year. A virtual technician team that handles service calls remotely, built after RTI found most calls were new-hire training issues rather than equipment failures. And RTI Connect, a platform in development that folds invoicing, deliveries, and filtering data into one view.
Overall, the transition reads as continuity at the customer level and something more interesting at the ownership level. An energy sponsor owns the asset. A restaurant operations executive now runs it. The value sitting inside that closed loop is not the oil delivery. It is the clean, contracted, high-quality molecule coming back out.
For collectors and haulers, the practical read is that the top of the restaurant market keeps getting harder to touch while 88% of restaurants still run oil by hand. For traders and processors, the Phillips 66 lane is a named flow of roughly a million pounds a day under energy-sector ownership, and the quality argument attached to it is the one our industry will be answering next.
Sources: Restaurant Technology Guys podcast
