Leading Tyrone-based manufacturer Frylite has big plans to transform its business to be fully carbon neutral by 2030. With a new plant in Lisburn, the company is ever growing and evolving. It has already led the way in sustainability and ensuring the business is environmentally friendly through its waste cooking oil collection service, which is then converted into renewable energy.

The cooking oil supplier and waste cooking oil collection service, which was founded in 1988, employs over 200 people across its premises on the island of Ireland and supplies to 60% of the island’s restaurants, bars, hotels, bakeries, and caterers. Today, the company is regarded as one of Ireland’s leading vegetable oil suppliers and collectors, both in terms of product quality and customer service. Operating on a nationwide basis, Frylite services the needs of thousands of customers every day from their six bases, in Strabane, Coleraine, Dublin, Lisburn, Galway and Cork.

“Building the business around our customers, we set up and delivered a ground-breaking cooking oil supply and waste collection service,” said Eamon McCay, Founder and Managing Director. “As the business grew, gaining customers across the island of Ireland, we continued to develop our quality and service standards, seeing where and how we could add more value for customers, challenging existing practices and introducing innovations that continue to improve our customers’ businesses.”

Frylite provides its customers with a complete service package, including a regular, reliable and hassle-free supply and waste oil, fats and food waste collection service. Their products are of high quality and Frylite’s oils are sourced directly from refineries in Europe where origin and quality are guaranteed.

Always evolving, Frylite is keen to keep challenging and improving existing industry practices, introducing new and sustainable ways of doing things. “Food outlets used to send their used cooking oil to landfill or put it down the drain and it also used to go into animal feed but when regulation around this changed, we diversified into looking at biofuels and we now supply 100% of our used oil into bio-diesel.

“We were pioneers in putting decanter tanks into hotels and restaurants and always seem to be a solution provider to the market. In a unique system designed by Frylite, the oils are pumped off through specialised food grade calibrated meters ensuring the customer gets the exact volumes they require at each delivery, and in a way that is environmentally friendly with no waste packaging involved,” said Eamon. “With customised specially made separate storage tanks we can deliver specific oil products to our customers as well as collect the used oils in separate pumping and collection systems.”

Frylite continues to be at the cutting edge and the forefront of the industry. “In fact, we have become so well known for setting and leading many new industry standards that we can be rightly regarded as Ireland’s pre-eminent vegetable oil supplier and collector both in terms of product quality and customer service,” he said.

The company was also one of this year’s New Winners at the Deloitte Best Managed Companies Awards, testament to its innovation and its status as a leader within the industry. “Our customers are at the centre of everything we do and is embedded in our company

values,” said McCay. “We are continually investing in staff training, and in how we manage the company. Our belief in offering sustainable products informs everything we do.”