Mike Powers, a former live TV director and manager, has been serving the grease management needs in the commercial kitchens of more than 150 accounts across the Houston metropolitan area each week. He owns eight of Houston’s 12 territories and has grown his Filta business to 12 employees and eight mobile filtration units in his 12 years of business.
Earlier this year he secured the business at NASA Space Center, a huge personal win. His interest and affinity for NASA is palpable to anyone he speaks with. His parents actually met at NASA when his dad was an engineer on the Apollo Project and his mother was a secretary. Powers was born at a hospital (that he now services!) right near NASA so you might say that space is “in his blood.”
He had been trying to secure the NASA Space Center Houston business for some time but due to security, specialized protocols, and other contractual issues, had not made progress. When Wolfgang Puck took over the NASA kitchens, he sprang into action, leveraging his previous work in other Puck-run kitchens. Meetings began in December 2022 and he secured the business a few months later in May 2023.
Twice weekly now Powers’ team services Space Center Houston’s five fryers. Three 80-pound fryers pump out massive amounts of French fries and chicken tenders for tourists every day that are “out of this world” and two 50-pound fryers are used for catering. Powers and his Filta team microfilter the cooking oil to make it last longer, clean the fryers to keep food fresher and better tasting, and then remove the oil it when its useful life is done, ensuring it is recycled for biodiesel fuel, relieving kitchen staff from this dangerous, messy task and keeping kitchens running faster, greener, safer and cleaner.
He and his team also work in large stadiums and arenas like NRG Stadium where he serviced the Final Four NCAA Basketball Championship this past spring as well as working for more than three solid weeks every year at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, servicing the 100+ gigantic fryers nightly to keep fried food at that massive event churning out without a hitch. He’s so busy during Rodeo season that he adds staff for that event. They also service Minute Maid Park, home of the reigning World Series Champion Houston Astros after very home game as well as Constellation Field, Toyota Center and The Cynthia Wood Mitchell Pavilion. Powers says scheduling multiple large venues with constantly changing schedules is among his biggest ongoing challenges.
Another impressively large logistical feat is how Powers and the other two Filta Houston-area franchise owners, Andrew Seenandan and Tom Schwenke, service more than 50 hospitals throughout the metro area. Some require nightly service to keep grease management running smoothly at many of the most highly respected healthcare facilities in the nation including The UTMB MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Children’s, Houston Methodist, CHI St. Luke’s, Memorial Hermann and Ben Taub, all hospitals that are based in the world’s largest medical center, The Texas Medical Center with many satellite locations scattered around the region.
Another large feather in Mike Powers’ cap is being the preferred cooking oil partner for the Sysco Foods world headquarters in Houston. Sysco is the global leader in selling, marketing and distributing food products to restaurants, healthcare and educational facilities, lodging establishments and more, so the company certainly has a keen eye on quality as well as a focused priority on sustainability. Earning the business of filtering and changing the oil as well as cleaning the fryers for the four 50-pound fryers in the Sysco world headquarters employee cafeteria was no small feat. But an even larger kudo for Powers is servicing the six 50-pound fryers in Sysco’s Product Evaluation Center (PEC), a huge, glassed-in, immaculate hub for kitchen research and development by Sysco food engineers, scientists, chefs and other experts.
Also committed to high quality frying is Whole Foods and Filta services all 12 locations in the Houston area with microfiltration and removal twice a week as well as the original Whole Foods location (and others) in Austin, Texas, which is handled by local owner Pablo Gracia. Other Houston-area accounts that rely on Filta to keep their kitchens running faster, greener, safer and cleaner include the rapidly expanding local Common Bond Bistros, Texas Southern University, The University of Houston, Texas A&M University, Cinemark Movie Theaters, Margaritaville Resort, Moody Gardens and multiple corporate cafeterias such as Hewlett Packard, Halliburton, Shell Oil, Chevron Phillips and Phillips 66 World Headquarters locations. Filta even provides safe, environmentally friendly service for churches such as The Woodlands Methodist Church which has commercial kitchens with deep fryers as part of its ministry.
To learn more, about Filta ownership and the available territories, contact Rob Totten at rtotten@filta.com. To learn more about Filta’s services including fryer cleaning, microfiltration and waste oil removal/recycling, please call 866-51-FILTA or visit GoFilta.com for 24-hour live chat.
