In grocery,
the fridges are the business
A food retailer’s power bill is mostly refrigeration, and refrigeration is the one thing that cannot be turned down to save money. That makes rate structure unusually important — you cannot fix a grocery bill by changing behaviour, so it has to be fixed on the contract.
What drives the bill
The load profile of a grocery & retail site
Before anyone quotes you a rate, it is worth being clear about what your site actually does with electricity — because that, not the headline number, is what decides whether a plan fits.
Refrigeration is a 24/7 base load
It runs at 3am on a Sunday exactly as it runs at midday Friday, which means a large share of your consumption is completely inelastic.
Compressors start hard
On larger connections, peak draw — not total consumption — can drive capacity and demand charges that a cents-per-unit comparison never shows.
Long trading hours
Lighting and climate control run across most of the day, spreading load into every part of a time-of-use structure.
The till cannot go down
Which quietly makes connectivity a revenue system rather than an overhead line.
Why chains lose money in the gaps
Retail groups tend to have grown store by store, and their utility arrangements grew the same way. Each connection carries its own price category and sits in its own lines area, and each was signed at whatever was on offer that year. Nobody has a single page showing what the group pays per store.
When that page finally gets made, the interesting thing is almost never the average — it is the range. The gap between your best-priced store and your worst is usually wider than anyone expects, and closing it is ordinary work rather than a negotiation triumph.
Peak draw versus total use
Above a certain connection size, part of what you pay is set by how hard you pull, not by how much you use in total. Refrigeration plant starting together, particularly after an outage or a defrost cycle, can set a peak that then prices a whole period.
Sites that have never had this read tend to assume their bill is simply a function of consumption. Often a meaningful slice of it is not.
Connectivity is not an overhead here
When EFTPOS drops in a food retailer, trade stops. That makes the specification questions — restoration service levels, failover, whether support is a business line or a consumer queue — commercial decisions rather than IT preferences, and worth reviewing alongside power rather than separately.
Where we look first
The review, in order
- The spread between your best and worst priced stores
- Demand and capacity charges on larger connections
- Refrigeration treated as inelastic base load in the comparison
- One consolidated view of what the group actually spends
- Connectivity resilience where trade depends on it
These are clients, named with the same disclosure as our homepage. We do not publish any client’s figures, contract terms or savings — those belong to them, not to our marketing.
Questions
What grocery & retail operators ask us
Yes, and it is one of the places we are most useful. Multi-site operators usually have connections that were signed up at different times, on different price categories, in different lines areas, all landing as separate bills. Consolidating those ICPs onto a single arrangement — and getting one view of what the whole group actually spends — is core work for us, not an edge case.
Because part of every commercial power rate is a delivery charge set by the lines company for your area, and lines areas price differently from one another. Two identical cafes on identical usage, one in one region and one in another, do not pay the same rate — and a national average hides that entirely. Our rate lookup is keyed to your ICP’s own network and price category, so what you see is the rate that applies to your connection.
It compares two real numbers, not two guesses. The current side is what you actually pay — the monthly figure you give us, annualised. The new side is built from the real rates that apply to your ICP’s network and price category: your monthly kWh at the variable rate, plus the fixed daily charge for 365 days, plus our service fee, then grossed up for GST so it lines up with the total you read off your bill. We deliberately do not assume you are currently on a discount, which makes the estimate conservative rather than flattering.
Then we say so. Our savings tool has a specific outcome for exactly this case: when your current rate already beats what we can put in front of you, it tells you that instead of manufacturing a saving out of rounding. A broker who can never find a reason to leave you alone is not giving you advice.
Bill Health Check
Three questions, no bill, no contact details. You get a straight read on where businesses shaped like yours usually have room — on this page, right now.
Other sectors we work in
Your site, your numbers
See what your grocery & retail site could pay
Your ICP, roughly what you use and roughly what you pay. Two minutes, and the comparison is run against the rates that genuinely apply to your connection.
No obligation · Fees agreed in writing before any switch