Panos Vrettos, Kostas Sigalas, and Vasilis Apostolopoulos, founders of BibeCoffee.
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Published by Ivaylo Simov, Roberta Tihomirova and Nikola Yanev.
Coffee is more than just a morning pick-me-up, it’s a ritual, a cultural touchstone, and a billion-dollar industry. But have you ever stopped to think about the journey your cup of joy takes before it reaches your hand? From the carefully tended farms where it’s grown, to the bustling coffee shops where it’s served. Then you add more variables connected to the preparation itself, which consumers rarely see – temperature and pressure of the water, consistency of the grind, timing – every step of the process is crucial to the final product. And that’s where BibeCoffee comes in, guaranteeing that your morning brew was made just the way it was intended to be.
BibeCoffee helps coffee chains, roasters, and machine manufacturers
monitor and improve the brewing quality of every coffee they serve by providing them with data, unmatched insights and visibility. It is an IoT real time monitoring solution that transforms every professional coffee machine to a smart connected terminal, minimizing revenue loss and safeguarding quality. Using the innovative hardware device and easy to use platform, the company aims to streamline the way coffee brands and coffee chains work and operate – guaranteeing that high quality coffee is always served without compromises.
Coffee is commercially produced in more than 50 countries
and the world drinks upwards of 3 billion cups a day. Given that the coffee industry is relatively old and less digitized, there is a huge potential for increasing efficiency throughout the value chain – particularly at the final stage on the out-of-home market where the highest value is captured.
Coffee roasters and brands are now opening to the possibility to control the quality of their end product using IoT technology installed on the coffee machines in retail locations. Most large manufacturers of professional coffee machines already offer connected devices and software interface to monitor the coffee quality and machine performance. However, these traditional manufacturers cannot offer competitive digital experience and software platform that can support machines from multiple brands.
It takes 6 months to create the perfect coffee bean
and 30 seconds to destroy it. Billions are invested to achieve high coffee quality, reinventing all production stages. The question is, does this high-quality coffee reach the end customer’s mug?
Roasters (like Lavazza for example) buy exclusivity with coffee shops and usually provide them with the coffee machines, cups and other branded materials. However, shop owners and/or baristas can replace or dilute the branded coffee with cheaper alternatives. This translates into revenue loss and brand damage for coffee brands on one hand, and inconsistent and poor quality on the other. On top of that, service intervals for coffee machines are miscalculated, whereas an expensive on-demand service network is maintained, while some of the most common problems are simple to handle and don’t require specialized on premise interventions (like unplugged machines from the power outlet). With the advance of specialty coffee, quality compliance and recipes (sequence and time of preparation) have become ever more important, coffee brands find it difficult to ensure consistency and adherence to the standards.
BibeCoffee solves these problems by
ensuring that end-to-end coffee production at the coffee shop is performed on the standards set by roasters, associations, and coffee chains. Its user-friendly platform gives coffee brands access to all their coffee machines at a glance and collects useful information and analytics – like what their actual coffee production, sales projection, and future consumption look like. It allows them to monitor in real-time the coffee machines’ proper usage and operation, location validation, ensure brand quality, and provide an enhanced experience to the customers. And although some (newer) coffee machines might have their own telemetry solutions, BibeCoffee’s advantage is that its device is “machine agnostic” and can be retrofitted to all existing brands. And since all major clients use more than one coffee machine manufacturer they want to have their metrics aggregated in a single dashboard, not many.
The three founders of BibeCoffee
– Vasilis Apostolopoulos (co-founder and CEO), Panos Vrettos (co-founder and CSO), and Kostas Sigalas (co-founder and R&D Lead), started the company with almost zero experience in the coffee industry. However, they brought a wealth of knowledge from their time as senior executives at Vodafone where they met and worked together. With a background in IoT and a passion for innovation, they were uniquely suited to tackle the challenges facing the coffee industry. But it wasn’t until Panos started experimenting with a side project, a coffee shop, that the potential for BibeCoffee truly began to take shape. As he delved into the inner workings of the coffee shop business and the machines themselves, he saw firsthand the issues that needed to be addressed. And so, with a sense of curiosity and a desire to make a difference, the team embarked on a journey to explore the world of coffee and create a solution that would revolutionize the industry.
Curious to learn more? Head to https://bibecoffee.com.
