Smoothie King Recipe Engine
Success Story – Embedded Systems & CRM/POS Integration
Technology Needs
One of Louisiana’s fastest growing companies, Smoothie King wanted to move from an outdated Point of Sale (POS) to a new, iPad based system – Revel. Smoothie King was understandably concerned about any type of cloud-storage solution. Their proprietary recipes are the secret to their success. Above all they needed a system that could be remotely managed and easily updated across more than 300 locations worldwide.
Recipe Management Engine
At the time, Smoothie King was using an out dated POS system that was expensive to maintain and took up a lot of counter space. Recipes were stored in flat files, and additions and changes were manually entered to over 400 files. This led to poor data integrity and made documentation error prone. Worst of all, the POS system had zero integration with their inventory. To bridge the gap between Revel’s POS software and Smoothie King’s existing inventory management, LookFar created the Recipe Management Engine (RME) – a fully solid-state miniature computer that is housed inside each Smoothie King location. Working with the new POS vendor we created a bespoke API-driven management system.
Given any number of modifications to a smoothie the new system produced a uniform recipe for the creation of said smoothie. First, the RME generates a “kitchen slips,” which details the instructions for creating the smoothie based on the specific combination of ingredients. A customer request to eliminate banana, or milk, can significantly change the consistency and quality of the final smoothie, so the kitchen slip pulls from over XYZ recipe modifiers, which ensure uniformity of the final beverage. The RME also deducts the exact amount of ingredients from Smoothie King’s inventory, based on the individual smoothie created. This means that all substitutions and additions to standard recipes are accurately reflected in the final inventory statements. Not only does this make stocking and ordering easier, but it allows Smoothie King to more accurately track trends across hundreds of locations.
Just-In-Time (JIT) Deployments
We deployed a small number of RMEs to pilot locations within Greater New Orleans initially. Utilizing SSH tunnels, the RMEs are centrally controlled from a management cluster. The team is able to remotely manage and troubleshoot, as well as push software updates to test-RMEs for quality assurance purposes. The process of deploying a new RME is fully automated. Smoothie King is able to convert the bare-metal machine to a fully provisioned RME within five minutes.
After successful implementation of the pilot RMEs, we rolled-out devices to all corporately owned locations. The team scaled up for full deployment to more than 600 locations worldwide including Singapore and South Korea. A team will manage system and hardware health tests for all RMEs from SKFI offices.
Catering Challenges
After deployment of the pilot RMEs, Smoothie King quickly identified an edge case that was resulting in unnecessary application of company resources – large catering orders of the same recipe. The POS vendor was unable to modify the solution to prevent sending duplicate data from POS to the RME. LookFar was asked to deliver a work-around within forty-eight hours. The team was able to combine specific pieces of meta-data provided by the POS request to craft a response that properly reduced inventory levels without requiring multiple prints of the recipe.
This exceptional response speed to this unforeseen requirement allowed Smoothie King to maintain operational consistency during the pilot
Future Development
Future improvements are planned to make the new RME system highly available. This will be implemented by creation of a tightly controlled cloud-hosted version of the RME that will provide a “fail over” for stores whose physical RME is out of service. We have also created a dashboard for managing and maintaining recipes and ingredients that allow Smoothie King to remotely add new products to the RME without our assistance.
