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AI: The Secret Ingredient to Foodservice Success
There are some days when you want to take a proper break at lunchtime. Then there are the days when you want—or need—to just grab something and go. If that something should happen to be a salad or a container of soup—a item without an easy barcode, that is—your quick, on-the-run meal is going to be hampered by a slower checkout process (or if not yours, that of the salad-eater in front of you). But AI-powered solutions do exist for the foodservice space, beyond those you might find at a drive-through.
This is AI technology that can really improve your day-to-day quality of life in a small but significant way, not merely technology for its own sake. And it’s not just the customer experience that can benefit; there are advantages for a foodservice staff and for foodservice businesses as well.
Sergii Khomenko, Founder of touchless self-checkout solution provider Autocanteen, serves up an AI-powered self-checkout solution for us. He discusses challenges the foodservice industry wrestles with, efficiencies the Autocanteen technology can tap, and how the human touch is still important to hospitality (Video 1).
Please explain the benefits of self-service in foodservice today.
Self-service solutions like Autocanteen, they obviously help to maximize and enhance the capacity of teams during peak times. Before an AI self-service solution, it wasn’t possible to do self-service for transactions within hospitality because some of those products, they’re not labeled and there are no barcodes on them. But with the technologies of computer vision and machine learning, it’s possible to identify those products very, very quickly—in a very similar fashion to the way humans do it—and then present the total and automate that process.
Operationally, the main challenge is that people tend to get hungry at very similar times, and so they all turn up for lunchtime or for breakfast, and it’s hundreds or thousands of people. You need to serve them with food quickly, and then you also need to complete the transaction very quickly so that the food doesn’t get cold and so that people don’t waste their time.
Also, imagine if you’re short on staff that day. Labor is always a factor for any operation, for any team, so it’s important to think how you can utilize the capacity of your staff in the best possible way to enhance speed and to enhance customer service.
Those are, I think, the main challenges that the foodservice operators tackle during service times, and with our solution we help to remove some of that load from their shoulders and help them to get through that service more quickly and more efficiently.
How does the Autocanteen AI-automation solution work?
Traditional checkout points, manned checkout points, they take up to 30 seconds per transaction, and that is not very fast—only two customers per minute checking out on each checkout point. With an automated solution we can do it three to four times faster; one checkout point can process four to six customers per minute.
That’s where the automation really, really shines, and that’s where the Autocanteen solution can really bring benefits—otherwise it’s tricky to get the same speed and efficiency. Our terminals can identify every item in the transaction within a second. As you place the tray or the retail items in front of the terminal, the algorithm will take the inputs, and within a second it will prompt the total on the screen. Then of course it takes a couple of seconds for the customer to acknowledge the total and pay it, but we can still end up with a sub-10-second transaction from start to finish, and with the receipt.
“#Hospitality, it cannot run without people, and it shouldn’t; I’m a big believer about that. However, those functions that are very repetitive and monotonous, where they can be automated, they will.” – Sergii Khomenko, @autocanteen via @insightdottech
Some of the locations that we support, they cater for 2,000 people. Imagine what kind of operation it is to feed all of those people within one or two hours. Using the Autocanteen solution, they can have 20 to 30 transactions land within a minute at peak time with just a few terminals; to achieve the same speed of service it would require a lot more manned till points. So the numbers just speak for themselves.
If the checkout process is much quicker, it only increases customer satisfaction because it’s done in a very quick and efficient way and the food doesn’t get cold. Some people see it as a sort of magic machine that processes their transactions.
And imagine how powerful staff members can feel. Previously they could only process two people per minute, but now they’re just keeping an eye on a much more efficient process. We pretty much give the team more eyes, if you like, to do the job and give them more processing power. They can do it all by themselves, just keeping an eye on the flow. So there are multiple benefits of such an implementation.
What type of technology makes this automation possible?
Our solution relies fundamentally on computer vision and machine learning to identify meals or retail items very, very quickly and efficiently. Computer vision feeds the input into the algorithms, and then comes the analysis, the decomposition, the classification, and the learning. The terminals, they are all interconnected within the same location, within the same account; once you’ve taught one machine, the other machines can utilize the same knowledge.
And all the terminals are managed via a web-based admin panel, so you can make changes to add products, make pricing amendments, view reporting, or see how your sales are going. That’s all available at your fingertips, and you get the information synchronized pretty much instantly. That’s what the technological offering looks like, and those are its fundamental components.
What about the value of leveraging technology from partnerships?
We are super thankful to Intel and to that partnership: We rely on their components in our software and our hardware. And one of the Intel components that we use is OpenVINO™. It’s blazing fast, and we can pretty much make decisions and computations on the fly. It really shows the difference, comparing it to other frameworks that we’ve tried before, and we can only recommend it highly. OpenVINO has been an integral part of our solution, for sure.
And apart from the partnership with Intel, we have others that help us with things like payment processing. On the hardware side, we work with vendors such as Elo Touch, which also has great products and a great platform that we run on. It also has Intel processors, and we prefer to run our applications on those processors. So this Intel partnership has been super helpful during our whole journey.
Can you share any of your use cases or customer examples?
There is one location in central London that processes about a million pounds a year and serves hundreds of thousands of customers. They saved a lot of labor effort that used to be needed to process those transactions, and now those people can focus on better customer service or on helping elsewhere, instead of being at the tills. In addition, that company measured that the Autocanteen solution saved thousands of hours in customer queuing time.
Restaurant Associates—part of Compass Group—is another great partner in the UK. And Restaurant Associates just won an award at the Cateys, a prestigious award in the UK for the catering and foodservice industry. The award was “Best Use of Technology” by a foodservice operator, and that was for the implementation of Autocanteen and of our solution. So that was fantastic recognition, obviously, within the industry that it was the best solution on the market.
Our journey started in 2020, during that first pandemic year. At the time, Aramark was looking for a fast and touchless AI self-checkout solution, and we had just that. Fast-forward four years, and our terminals, they’re helping operators such as Compass Group, Dussmann, Delirest, and others to enhance their foodservice. It’s also within banks, insurance companies, the Ministry of Defense, factories, warehouses, entertainment. So it’s been a great journey.
Are there other industries that these self-service capabilities can be applied to?
We are already helping some retail sites to enable either fast transactions or just 24/7 capability for unattended transactions. For example, there are micromarkets that just have some products and a couple of terminals that customers, say, hotel guests, can use at any time.
How do you envision the foodservice industry changing?
If we look at the future through the prism of automation and what’s going to happen in the coming years, of course we cannot say that every function is going to be automated. Hospitality, it cannot run without people, and it shouldn’t; I’m a big believer about that. However, those functions that are very repetitive and monotonous, where they can be automated, they will.
We are bringing this into play for transactional functions right now, of course, but we can also see these efforts happening in the kitchen, in the back of the house. There are actually some companies that are already offering robotics solutions for making meals, preparing pizzas, and so on. So, repetitive tasks, they will be automated, but technology is not going to entirely replace people in hospitality, that’s for sure.
Related Content
To learn more about self-checkout, listen to Serving Up the Future of the Foodservice Industry and read AI Self-Checkout Redefines Food Service Efficiency. For the latest innovations from Autocanteen, follow them on X/Twitter at @autocanteen and on LinkedIn.
This article was edited by Erin Noble, copy editor.