Instant healthy meals
A turn-key solution for 100+ vending machines with ready-to-heat and ready-to-eat meals
Project review:
Brief
The vending machines operator, successful in selling snacks and drinks via 1000+ locations already, decided to start a all-new product category of healthy lunch meals for busy people. Unlike their existing proposition, which mainly consisted of snacks, drinks and sweets these new items were cooked and packed by the company itself. Such meals have only 48 to 72 hours before expiry and must be consumed quickly, otherwise becoming a waste. The processes of cooking, moving and loading of fresh meals require reliable back-end automation solution. As a result, we developed a full-stack application, which connected all the above mentioned processes, and also included customer interface, payment processing and business reporting modules.
Services
Automated processes, Consulting, Software development, Software integration, UX and UI design
Industry
Food retail, HoReCa
Year
2018
Scalable fresh meal vending business demands operational excellence and human factor control
Challenge:
Fresh food industry is very demanding to new technology, as the market players hold responsibility for health and even life of their consumers. Meals must be first of all fresh, which is a brings a lot of challenge of keeping the product within the expiry dates. Operating a network of fresh food vending machines means perfection in operations. Efficiency of logistics and operations and human factor control are the main success factors in this industry.
Freshness, taste and diversity were digitized to for operational excellence and customer happiness
Solution:
We developed the solution which automated the operations with little room for human intervention on the machine operator. Only with such a configuration the company can guarantee freshness of the product and avoid negative feedback. Rating system provided real time feedback on the new products and AI-supported assortment module helped the warehouse to fill-in the vitrine with relevant products. On the customer side we implemented the 15 minutes booking, rating and various types of loyalty programs like “member get member” and “buy 9 get 10”.
