Case Study: Festival Foods achieves increased equipment uptime and near-elimination of false alarms with Accruent vx Maintain, vx Sustain and vx Observe

How the major grocery retailer modernized its maintenance program, ensuring portfolio consistency and allowing for optimal energy consumption

Skogen’s Festival Foods, a 75-year-old, employee- and family-owned grocery chain based in Onalaska, WI (32 stores, $1B+ annual sales), needed better consistency and visibility into its store equipment and maintenance. The retailer faced inconsistent tracking of equipment and repairs, limited control over refrigerant costs and vendor accountability, and an alarm-monitoring program that generated excessive, often irrelevant alerts leading to missed critical alarms and product risk.

Festival Foods implemented Accruent’s vx Maintain, vx Sustain and vx Observe to centralize maintenance workflows, manage refrigerant data and provide remote equipment monitoring. The integrated solution delivered full maintenance oversight, enterprise refrigerant tracking, and consolidated alarm data—filtering 300,000 raw alarms to fewer than 9,000 valid events—resulting in higher equipment uptime, data-driven repair vs. replace decisions, reduced vendor calls and costs, improved refrigerant control, and clearer vendor SLA tracking.

Festival Foods

Cody Sandahl

Energy And Material Recovery Manager