Internorga 2023 is behind us and we are grateful for the many great impressions, visions and concepts that we were able to experience and take home with us.
Inspired by the strong performance of our partners, we have once again created a booth concept that fills us with pride and clearly reflects our identity. The concrete idea behind our booth is quite simple: visitors enter a state-of-the-art, fully digitised company canteen. Accompanied by our great staff, they will be able to discover and experience live different scenarios called “Journeys”.
The “Aitme” Journey
It’s simple: open the qnips app and navigate to the Aitme Robotic Kitchen menu. You select one of the available dishes, customise the ingredients if you wish, and place your desired dish in the shopping basket.
Once you have placed your order, something extraordinary happens! It is not the kitchen staff that prepares the food, but an autonomous robot. This robot can produce more than 80 different dishes, and more than 60 of them per hour! Due to lack of space on our booth, this robot was not live, but a video screen from booth partner Aitme gave an overview of the rest of the preparation process.
The „Innovend“ Journey
The halls at Internorga 2023 also allowed us to present larger showcases, one of which is the Innovend Journey. Again, you open the qnips app and select the Lock-Blox menu. The kitchen team then takes the order, prepares the food and – this is where it gets exciting – delivers it to a locker called a ‘Lock-Blox’.
A Lock-Blox can be roughly explained as follows: A large locker with individual compartments and cooling elements. The compartments can be opened individually via an app and filled. The aim of the system is to streamline the preparation and collection of food. Employees order their meals and can reliably collect them at a later time of their choosing. This optimises production planning, as only the food actually ordered is placed in the box. Less waste, more tasty food.
Less food waste thanks to accurate production planning
But what happens if a meal is cancelled? The Lock-Blox trays use coloured LEDs to indicate whether a meal is ready for collection, hot, cold or, in the case of a cancellation, ready for sale. It looks good, tastes good and helps the environment.
The LinX iQ aka “Smart Fridge” is even more flexible than the Lock-Blox. A credit card stored in the qnips app is used to generate a QR code that opens the Smart Fridge. The fridge-like vending machine looks like the vending machines you see at train stations and swimming pools. But instead of waiting for a metal crane, conveyor belt or spiral to collect products for customers, they simply reach into the Smart Fridge and take what they need. Using internal sensors such as weight scales or NFC scanners, the fridge recognises which and how many products have been removed. It then adds them to your shopping basket in the app and triggers the automatic payment process as soon as you close the door. The fact that you feel like you’re stealing something, especially the first time you use it, is a testament to how simple the process is.
The „Order Kiosk“ Journey
Ordering and working with the qnips app is fun and very easy. However, sometimes we also need on-site ordering options, for example to ensure better legibility, faster order processing or the ability to order without a smartphone. At our booth at Internorga 2023, we demonstrated this with an ordering kiosk system using Pan Oston hardware. In combination with qnips, the hardware combines menu display, shopping cart, product scanning and self-service checkout in a compact, locally mounted interface.
On this interface, customers can touch select their meal, order it and send it to the kitchen. When the order is received by the kitchen, an order receipt is printed with the order details. As soon as they start preparing the food, it can be scanned into our Kitchen Monitor and given the status ‘in progress’. The monitor provides the kitchen with an easy-to-read list of which orders are at which stage of preparation.
Easy order processing in the kitchen
However, a simple screen can easily be overlooked in the heat of the kitchen battle. That’s why our Kitchen Monitor is connected to a signal lamp that lights up in three colours, flashes and buzzes when the order phase changes. The kitchen is now well informed, but what about the waiting customers?
Our booth this year featured the “Vestaboard”, an analogue-mechanical display board like the ones you see in airports and train stations. (The ones that sound a bit like fluttering pigeons when you change the display. Or maybe there are real pigeons at the station that sound like that. Who knows?) This board displays orders in order of processing status, effectively changing the display with each update. In this way, guests can follow the status of their order in real time. For those who are not yet convinced by the clattering analogue charm of the Vestaboard, there is of course also a regular digital pick-up monitor – after all, eating should be fun for everyone.
The “qnips App Redesign” Journey
You’ve probably noticed that our mobile app is a recurring topic in this blog post. This is not only because our apps are the heart of our software, but also because we were proud to present the redesign of our qnips app at Internorga. You could see our new design for IOs and Android on several test devices. And it gets even better: in the future, this design will also characterise all other qnips-related mobile applications.
As part of the redesign, we are also introducing our 14 redesigned allergen icons in our app and on the Catering Portal. These are different in shape and colour from the current icons and help to make the allergens easier to identify.
What we have learned from Internorga 2023
The end of each Internorga always means preparing for the next one. That’s why we’re looking forward to presenting what we’re burning for next year: Innovative software, accessible, elegant hardware and a team that is passionate and knowledgeable about all of this. Many good and intensive discussions have shown that the digitalisation of company catering is not just a trendy topic.
qnips says thank you and is looking forward to the next Internorga together!
For more information visit www.qnips.io
