Smart healthy fridges

You surely know the feeling of having to stay late at work with nothing to eat. And we all know it is harder to work on an empty stomach. So we usually eat whatever is to hand, which is not always healthy. That is why, some years ago – in 2019, to be precise – an interesting project emerged with a smart solution for healthy eating in the workplace – FreshPoint.

At its heart is a uniquely designed smart fridge full of healthy products, which uses artificial intelligence to manage its own operation and selling prices, and accepts payment by card. It is primarily intended for the communal areas of medium-sized and large companies. 

These FreshPoints are operated by the company Zdravá lednice, which stocks them with good food from many well-known restaurants and popular outlets such as Zátiší, Sklizeno, Sushi Time, Eat Perfect, YamYam and others. Employees can therefore have fresh, high-quality food available all day long, even when they do not have time to visit their favourite restaurant. They do not even need cash – they simply choose their meal and pay contactlessly by payment card, mobile phone or smartwatch.

We are pleased to have been part of this project from the very beginning. Over that time we have had the opportunity to implement more than 130 payment terminals in these vending devices. As the iUC180B terminals used for the integrations are being phased out, we have gradually replaced them with the newer LANE/3000 payment terminals, which McDonald's also uses in its restaurants.

One of the latest integrations with this payment terminal is the FreshPoint located at the headquarters of Kytary.cz. Connection to the control unit was straightforward via TCP/IP. Card payments are authorised by our partner bank, UniCredit Bank. This attractive employee benefit is offered by companies based mainly in Prague and Brno, including Mall.cz, ZOOT, Rohlík.cz, Equa bank, ČSOB, Creative Dogs and others.

However, placing self-service devices in companies' communal areas is far from the end of this project. Zdravá lednice is taking its concept further and opening new FreshPoints in public places accessible to the general public. For example, in the fridge located in the OC Máj shopping centre in Prague, visitors could also find food approaching its use-by date, sold at a 50% discount. The aim was to prevent the waste of food that could not be consumed in time from all the fridges operating at corporate clients. This new concept saved around 2,000 portions of food a month that would otherwise have ended up in the bin. 

FreshPoint is an interesting concept for distributing healthy food, and we are confident it will continue to expand. It is the first of its kind so far, but we believe that more smart projects like it will appear in the field of self-service food devices. Our job will be to support them with easy contactless payments. You can read more about our integrations of unattended payment terminals in vending here.