Neutral Fuels announced it has created a mobile app to enable tighter control of the collection and delivery of used cooking oil for its UAE customer, McDonald's. Thousands of litres of used oil are collected from McDonald’s Dubai restaurants daily and delivered to their refinery for processing net zero biofuel for their customers, creating a self-sufficient closed loop for the city-scale operation, said the company.

“A paperless collection and delivery process improves the company’s logistics operation,” said Walid Fakih, General Manager of McDonald’s UAE. “The app increases the productivity of the drivers and reduces the chance of errors. From a management point of view, it gives us an even tighter control of all information in the process and enables us to quickly track quantities and provenance.”

The new mobile app was developed by an entity within the Neutral Group, Neutral Software based in New Zealand. “Neutral Software is also currently developing a new client portal as part of a larger group project to bring all of its Internet of Things data in-house and reduce dependence on third party services and solutions,” said Karl Feilder, CEO, The Neutral Group. 

The locked-down GPS aware tablets are supplied by the company to McDonald's drivers each morning together with that day’s collection information, correlated to the truck being driven. Drivers collect full ROCs from many different stores during the course of a day, and supply empty replacement ROCs for each one. Delivery and collection records are agreed and approved between driver, restaurant manager and the refinery, enabling the company to manage deliveries on a ROC by ROC basis or in bulk. Alerts are raised if the quantity of oil received is different from the quantity collected, and if all ROCs are not present. Once a delivery is complete, a detailed receipt is emailed to the client enabling an overview of the entire process and flagging up alerts before they become problems, as per the statement.  

“We’ve developed a slightly different version of the app for use by municipalities, and will continue to use technology to give our clients an edge that enables them to improve fuel consumption and logistics,” said Feilder.