Download PDF
Phenix's Battle Against Food Waste with Twilio
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Networks & Connectivity - 5G
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Predictive Waste Reduction
- Retail Store Automation
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Phenix, a France-based startup, is on a mission to reduce food waste by connecting retailers with unsold food to customers who value sustainability and a good bargain. The company has served over 50 million meals that would have otherwise been discarded to over 400,000 customers. However, the process is time-sensitive with many moving parts that need to work together; otherwise, the products will be unusable. Sellers post a general description of each day’s offering, including price, number of baskets in stock, and available pickup window. Retailers might only have a few baskets available, and the pick-up windows can be short. Customers can set alerts so they know immediately when a type of food they want or a specific shop they like has posted an offer. The challenge was to ensure real-time communication between the sellers and the customers.
About The Customer
Phenix is a France-based startup that is committed to reducing food waste. They enable retailers with unsold food to connect with customers who appreciate sustainability and a good bargain. The company has served over 50 million meals that would have otherwise been discarded to over 400,000 customers. Their customers include restaurants, grocers, bakeries, caterers, hotels, and other retailers who can bundle unsold food at a heavy discount in a themed “basket” of produce, pastries, fully cooked meals, or other items nearing their expiration date. The merchants post what’s available that day, and customers can immediately see what’s for sale near them. Then, via the Phenix app, they simply reserve, pay, and alert the store that they’re on their way for pickup.
The Solution
Phenix uses Twilio Programmable SMS and Twilio SendGrid Email API to run tens of thousands of daily interactions. Product updates from stores, basket availability alerts, and two-way communication regarding product purchases, cancellations, and pickups are sent to the store and customer via SMS. The store will also receive an SMS if an order has been cancelled, releasing that customer’s basket immediately for purchase by someone else. Using Programmable SMS empowered the team at Phenix to launch a mobile app in a fast and cost efficient way. Twilio’s system handles the complexity of global regulation governing text marketing, freeing the developers to concentrate on building and scaling the complex product for each country’s unique market. Transactional email messages go out in real-time using Twilio SendGrid’s Email API. Order confirmations and pickup notifications are sent from the store to the customer once the customer has initiated a purchase through the app.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Improving Production Line Efficiency with Ethernet Micro RTU Controller
Moxa was asked to provide a connectivity solution for one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. This multinational corporation, with retail presence in 130 countries, 23 global braches, and over 66,000 employees, sought to improve the efficiency of their production process by migrating from manual monitoring to an automatic productivity monitoring system. The production line was being monitored by ABB Real-TPI, a factory information system that offers data collection and analysis to improve plant efficiency. Due to software limitations, the customer needed an OPC server and a corresponding I/O solution to collect data from additional sensor devices for the Real-TPI system. The goal is to enable the factory information system to more thoroughly collect data from every corner of the production line. This will improve its ability to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and translate into increased production efficiencies. System Requirements • Instant status updates while still consuming minimal bandwidth to relieve strain on limited factory networks • Interoperable with ABB Real-TPI • Small form factor appropriate for deployment where space is scarce • Remote software management and configuration to simplify operations
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
How Sirqul’s IoT Platform is Crafting Carrefour’s New In-Store Experiences
Carrefour Taiwan’s goal is to be completely digital by end of 2018. Out-dated manual methods for analysis and assumptions limited Carrefour’s ability to change the customer experience and were void of real-time decision-making capabilities. Rather than relying solely on sales data, assumptions, and disparate systems, Carrefour Taiwan’s CEO led an initiative to find a connected IoT solution that could give the team the ability to make real-time changes and more informed decisions. Prior to implementing, Carrefour struggled to address their conversion rates and did not have the proper insights into the customer decision-making process nor how to make an immediate impact without losing customer confidence.