We recently attended RFID Journal LIVE! 2014 in Orlando, Florida. While at the show, we interviewed leaders, systems manufacturers, and solutions providers in the RFID industry. In this interview, we spoke with Steve Kremer, co-founder of SteadyServ.
When we ran across SteadyServ at RFID Journal LIVE! 2014, not only did we run across a cool implementation of RFID, we ran across the answer to restaurant and bar owner’s problems across the world — We are out of beer, and our next delivery isn’t until next week!
Steve Kremer, co-founder of SteadyServ, introduced us to a problem that restaurants and bars face with keeping beer on tap. How do we keep up with the large beer keg inventory? After all, the beer industry is about choice, so how do you know if you are running low of your most popular beer?
In bars and restaurants across the world, owners or managers order a certain number of kegs per month and switch them out when it taps out. If they knew ahead of time that the last keg of Blue Moon was running low, they could order more and prevent an outage. What will that do for the bar owners you ask? Sell more beer!
“A patron will drink 1/3 less when their favorite beer isn’t available.” – Steve Kremer, co-founder of SteadyServ
SteadyServ has developedand engineered a system using RFID to measure the amount of beer remaining in each keg in real time. The system is all about convenience. Real-time information is collected from the reader and delivered to the cloud. The data is then accessible via an app on your smart device.
The system retains key information such as delivery date, date tapped, age of beer, and the keg’s potential end date. The app also includes data such as how much safety stock remains, the next delivery date, and beer consumption trends. Basically, everything you need to know about your beer is on this app.
“We are saving the world from running out of beer and we are using RFID to do it” – Steve Kremer, co-founder of SteadyServ
Each keg is placed on a specially designed scale which includes a wireless sensor. The wireless sensor contains both an RFID reader and antenna and communicates the keg’s weight to the SteadyServ software. To sync the scale with the contents of the keg, the owner or manager prints and encodes an NFC label with the name of the beer and other information. The scale’s reader scans the tag and transmits the information via a Wi-Fi system called Zigbee that uploads the data to the cloud which is accessible via a mobile device. Managers or owners can access the information at any time and in any place ensuring the beer never runs out.
