Digital from brewing to beverage management: This is how gastronomy 4.0 works

Going out and enjoying the varied gastronomic offerings: For many people, a nice way to relax from everyday life. Eating, drinking, talking... All this remains analog for all guests. In the background, however, many processes are already digitalized with the help of innovative IoT technology, some visible, some invisible. This is exactly what today's blog article is about: the development towards Gastronomy 4.0 in many areas, from production to the consumer - and what ROBIOTIC in particular is contributing to it. Minor spoiler: Brewing, beverage management, artificial intelligence, Big Data, machine learning - all in the text!

 

Digital transformation in brewing

Beer brewing has become a veritable hype: many newly emerged craft beer breweries and the trend towards private brewing at home are the best proof of this. At the same time, however, beer consumption is falling continuously, and has been doing so in Germany for around 30 years. For this reason, not only large breweries but also smaller breweries must position themselves for the future and operate sensibly. The entire brewing industry is currently on the leap into the digital age - the potential is enormous. 

 

Artificial intelligence in beer development: Carlsberg's "Beer Fingerprinting Project"

Since 2017, the international brewery group Carlsberg has been relying on artificial intelligence. The goal: to optimize the brewing process and the taste of the product. In cooperation with Microsoft, Aarhus University and the Technical University of Denmark, they established the "Beer Fingerprinting Project," which was completed in 2020: the production of hundreds of different beers in very small quantities, which were evaluated using sensor technology and the data sets collected with it. Using the captured AI and machine learning algorithms, they simulated and predicted what they called a "taste palate impression." Within six months, the AI was able to differentiate between different lager and pilsner varieties and define taste characteristics. The most important insight from this project for the development department at Carlsberg was that the more data was evaluated, the more accurately the AI was able to put together beer varieties that optimally matched consumers' taste expectations depending on the situation and occasion. 

 

Smart beverage management: the intelligent "Smart Call" beer coaster

The intelligent "Smart Call" beer coaster particularly captures the pulse of Gastronomy 4.0. Because dull cardboard beer coasters that merely serve as coasters - that's yesterday's news. Together with the glass manufacturer RASTAL and the company Hoffmann+Krippner, ROBIOTIC has developed this digital beverage order system. The SmartCall offers the catering industry an IoT solution for service optimization and sustainable customer loyalty. And already convinced as a product so much that it was awarded the "German Innovation Award". 

The system consists of a smart coaster with an integrated weighing sensor and mobile communications, as well as special drinking glasses with NFC chips. The system detects the fill level of a glass and visualizes this information on a terminal, tablet or smartphone. This gives service staff a quick overview of the beverage glasses in the establishment and allows them to react at an early stage to empty glasses or other requests from guests, for example. So in the future, guests will no longer have to draw attention to themselves - on the contrary! SmartCall automatically informs the service staff so that they can now proactively approach the guest. The guest also has the additional option of calling the service staff or contacting the host via two integrated service buttons - particularly useful for service in areas of pubs that are difficult to see, such as terraces or beer gardens.

The SmartCall functionality is pure smart IoT technology: The intelligent coaster uses several sensors to determine the weight of the drinking glass and calculates the fill level on this basis. Subsequently, this data is transmitted to the ROBIOTIC IoT cloud via mobile radio and visualized on the user interface of a POS system, tablet or smartphone. In addition, different glass types (e.g. pilsner or wheat glass) can be identified and assigned via the NFC chip integrated in the glass.

Our conclusion: Gastronomy 4.0? We understand, we feel, we can - and we are already part of it.