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Unmanned self-service coffee shop integrates analytics

U.K.-based Honest Café, an unmanned self-service coffee shop, announced today it will be utilizing IBM's service Watson Analytics to discover key information.

June 11, 2015

U.K.-based Honest Café, an unmanned self-service coffee shop, announced today it will be utilizing IBM's service Watson Analytics to discover key information, according to a press release. The coffee shop is purely self-service since it has no employees and relies on several vending kiosks at its three locations to provide healthy foods and drinks to customers.

By not having any employees, Honest Café is able to keep costs low, but until recently analytics was a major challenge. "Because Honest is unmanned, it’s tough going observing what our customers are saying and doing in our cafes," said Mark Summerill, head of product development at Honest Café in the release. "We don’t know what our customers are into or what they look like. And as a startup it's crucial we know what sells and what areas we should push into."

In order to address this need, Honest Café decided to partner with IBM to analyze important data from the vending kiosks, such as product sales, time of day of certain purchases and other key metrics.

"We identified that people who buy as a social experience have different reasons than those who dash in and out grabbing just the one drink," Summerill said. "They also have a different payment method; the time of the day differs and the day of the week. Knowing this, we can now correctly time promotions and give them an offer or introduce a product that is actually relevant to them."

Honest Café also has plans to upgrade to Watson Analytics Personal edition to allow the company to analyze tweets from buyers.