The food service industry is undergoing an era of labor uncertainty and demand volatility. The reasons are many and complex: the rise of e-commerce, supply change disruptions due to natural catastrophes brought on by climate-change, and higher expectations of consumers regarding safety, quality, and sustainability. On top of all that, the FDA’s new 2026 traceability regulations loom on the horizon.
The bottom line is that food service operators must do more with less if they want their operations to remain agile enough to attract, satisfy, and retain customers. That means adopting IoT technologies to free employees from tedious, time-consuming, manual tasks so they can focus more hours on improving the customer experience.
Sensing and monitoring devices connected across the supply chain continue to create new opportunities for service organizations to navigate the flow of food by transitioning to a customer-centric approach. In this post, we’ll briefly discuss the benefits of this approach before looking into a real-life case study demonstrating how Sensing-as-a-Service achieves measurable results to ensure customer satisfaction.
A customer-centric supply chain is a business strategy that focuses on the needs of customers by maximizing the level of value delivered. The approach is demand-driven: it fosters direct alignment between on-shelf availability and rapid fluctuations in consumer demand. Most of all, it is holistic, connected, and seamless in its management of supply chain processes that prioritize customer experience and satisfaction.
The success of a customer-centric supply chain depends on the following best practices:
Pivoting from a traditional supply chain to a customer-centric value chain cannot be accomplished while relying on manual and analog technologies. In their place, the Internet of Things (IoT), prescriptive analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are proven to be far more effective for optimizing inventory and delivery.
Data analytics provides real-time visibility into critical control point (CCP) environmental settings. Data also generates the actionable insights food service managers need to ensure that every product is not only safe to consume, but also fresh and tasty, well after the point of sale.
Seamless integration of these digital technologies—a “Sensing-as-a-Service” solution—must be an enterprise-wide initiative from top to bottom, from the CEO down to temporary employees. Automation technologies must be understood and used effectively by each contributing department: operations, safety and compliance, loss prevention, facilities management, and quality control.
Transitioning to a an integrated, connected, digital Sensing-as-a-Service solution offers a wealth of benefits resulting in cost savings and higher revenues:
Intelligence benefits
Operations benefits
Product benefits
Customer benefits
Food retailers that “think customer-centric” can use Sensing-as-a-Service benefits to equip their workforce with time-saving solutions. Freed from tasks that are easily automated, staff can redirect their labor toward realizing the goals of service and delivery innovations that meet and exceed the evolving demands of customers.
A recent innovation in customer-centric food service is the dine-in movie theater. Broadening their menu options beyond popcorn, candy, and soft drinks, chain theaters such as AMC (see below), are offering premium hot and cold food and beverage items delivered directly to the customer’s seat.
This innovation seems inevitable, given the consuming public’s demand for higher quality products available to them instantly wherever they are—especially since the COVID pandemic has reinforced trends to stay closer to home. Dine-in options make more sense than ever, given the extreme competition within the movie exhibition industry to fill seats. Soaring ticket prices and the increasing threat from home streaming entertainment services such as Netflix have decreased theater attendance significantly over the last five years.
It is therefore not surprising that movie theaters have been reinventing concession sales. In fact, premium food and beverage menus now help differentiate chains as much as the movies they screen. And the proportion of theaters’ revenue based on concession sales has increased as ticket sales have dropped.
AMC Theaters is a great example of a dine-in theater that has succeeded using Sensing-as-a-Service to maintain high quality food preparation, holding and delivery. AMC staff bring food items such as ice-cold milkshakes, hot macaroni and cheese, and fresh salads to customers seated in the theater itself—not merely in an adjacent dining room. These items are promised to be hand-crafted in-house and made to order—at a premium price.
It is therefore essential that AMC kitchen staff maintain the proper temperature of these menu items to ensure, not merely food safety, but food quality as well. After all, if your ice cream arrives melted, the cheese on your pizza has congealed, or your lettuce is wilted—chances are you’ll think twice about repeat business.
AMC solved these problems by adopting a Sensing-as-a-Service solution for all their theater kitchens. They have replaced paper-and-pen manual systems with connected sensors that monitor food temperatures continuously and automatically. The system also provides specific instructions to the food prep staff—often inexperienced and temporary—on how to proactively maintain temperatures in the correct range rather than reacting to a customer complaint after the fact.
In this video, Rob Bennett, Director of Food & Beverage Product Strategy at AMC, discusses how SmartSense customized their Sensing-as-a-Service solution to the unique needs of their differently formatted theaters and kitchens, reduced manual labor, preserved food safety and quality, and delivered satisfaction their customers.