The Shout Magazine (New Zealand)

Going green in hospitality

Sustainability is top of mind for hospitality establishments across New Zealand, and the industry is increasingly open to new technology to minimise waste and maximise profitability.

Innovative startup, Trickle, is helping hospitality establishments to go green by reducing beer wastage, currently servicing 128 taps in bars and restaurants across New Zealand. Trickle has developed a tool to capture every drop of beer poured to maximise revenue by managing a beer’s lifecycle throughout the business.

By attaching a small device to beer lines in bars and restaurants, Trickle records data in real time, tracking every and any pour activity. With the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Trickle has turned its huge amount of data into value over the counter, identifying a 10-12% discrepancy across beverage usage versus sales.

While this data was initially stored via a local cloud service, Adrian Wills, Founder of Trickle, says “At a certain point, I realised my local provider was not cost effective and couldn’t provide me with the flexibility I needed. Plus, I had domains spread across different services, making it hard to capture data in a consistent way. In last twelve months, I’ve migrated large amounts of pour activity data to AWS DynamoDB, which has made all the difference.”

Recent company growth since the AWS migration has brought large customers to Trickle’s doorstep. “At first, I was scared to get a big customer too quickly, as I was already seeing problems in capturing data for our small customer base. Now that we’re working with AWS, I have a system I can throw lots of data at without concern, and it will scale quickly and easily.”

Tim Dacombe-Bird, NZ Country Manager at AWS says, “The capability, availability and scalability of AWS means small, local companies can grow quicker than ever before, at a fraction of the cost, and without disruption to the business. Trickle’s migration to AWS has proven cost effective for the startup, allowing for optimal business growth while helping local New Zealand establishments to minimise wastage.”