Connected Gastronomy for Better Service

The new keg has just been tapped, guests are clinking glasses, and the whole room smells temptingly of roast meat and sauerkraut: it's peak time in a traditional brewery on Friday evening. Numerous guests are winding down their week here with freshly tapped beer and regional cuisine. For the staff, this means handing out menus, taking orders, bringing food and drinks from the bar to the right tables, collecting the correct amount, choosing the shortest routes – even at peak times like this, every move has to be perfect and requires the full attention of the employees. But on closer inspection, one thing is different here: instead of following the hand signals of impatiently waiting guests, the waiters seem to know which tables are next in line for the next round even before the next order is placed.

Fulfilling wishes before the guest has as much as raised a hand is just the job for the Internet of Things (IoT) and, for example, Hoffmann + Krippner GmbH’s smart beermat. The company equips its beermats with Deutsche Telekom SIM cards that register automatically by means of the weight the kind of glass and how full it is. The beermat mails this information to the cloud, where an IoT platform analyzes the data and processes it to be clearly understood at a glance. When a customer’s glass is empty the barman is notified automatically and can serve the next glass right away or ask if there are any other wishes. In this way the manager learns which drinks are especially popular at which times. Purchasing can then be optimized and bottlenecks or surpluses avoided. Breweries too benefit from this customer data. Test projects have demonstrated that this technology can enable them to boost their sales by 10 to 15 percent.

Rastal GmbH & Co. KG have shown that digitally assisted gastronomy service can also be implemented in an entirely different way. Rastal, a glass manufacturer, collects customer information not from a beermat but from a smart glass. The glass comes with a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip and sends details of the kind or quantity of drinks ordered to a reader chip behind the bar. From there the data is relayed to Deutsche Telekom’s IoT Cloud, an IoT platform that analyzes the data and delivers extensive real-time evaluation of consumption data. Here too, bars and restaurants then find out exactly when which drinks are especially popular.

In addition to service and logistics for beverages this principle can be applied in many other areas of catering. With digital menus, NFC chips in cutlery or crockery, smart placemats or IoT sensors in the furniture, the future of gastronomy is connected. The resulting data can be used to order more efficiently, to anticipate peak periods, to optimize personnel planning and to offer guests service that is a total success. A powerful IoT platform is all that is needed. Deutsche Telekom’s Cloud of Things, for example, provides restaurateurs with simple and secure access to their data without requiring costly and time-consuming installation. They can retrieve all the relevant information via a Web app, access analytical tools, study evaluations and configure dashboards of their own. That opens up many ways in which they can acquire important information about their guests and optimize their business sustainably.