Voices

Pay for Coffee With Your Face

Jeff Osburn, founder of Fort Worth-based Canopy Point Coffee, developed the ultimate "smart" coffee shop that lets customers be their own barista. The intelliCafé has a tech-enabled platform with facial recognition and a smartphone app to keep it simple.

Jeff Osburn

Today’s daily gourmet coffee consumer not only demands a high-quality specialty coffee experience while away from home, but also requires the accessibility, availability, and convenience seldom found outside the traditional coffee shop. These away from home locations where people work, shop, study, or visit are plagued with subpar drink quality, long wait times, and limited hours of operation.

The office coffee pots, K-cup brewers, and vending machines fail to satisfy the gourmet coffee demand in hospitals, colleges, and businesses where coffee drinkers cannot find their favorites outside of normal business hours and weekends or without leaving the premises.

To address this need Canopy Point Coffee has developed the ultimate “smart” coffee shop—the intelliCafé—that is customer served and paid and doesn’t require any full-time employees to operate. The tech-enabled platform, which was developed jointly with Panasonic and Franke Coffee Systems, can make over 200 different hot and iced coffee shop favorites using the company’s own artisan roasted specialty grade coffees.

The company’s facial recognition “Face Pay” technology and Virtual Kiosk smartphone app make ordering and paying convenient and safe with contactless options—and it’s always open and ready to satisfy every taste.

The intelliCafé is the perfect alternative to the traditional coffee shop service for hotels, travel centers, hospitals, and other businesses that need gourmet coffee without full-time employees or a prohibitive investment to own and operate.

The Canopy Point intelliCafé is modular and portable without the need for floor drains or permanent fixtures. Its custom user interface, co-developed with Panasonic, provides an intuitive and engaging user experience, and a “help” function is available for a re-do of any drink for immediate customer satisfaction.

The intelliCafé is supported nationally by techs at Panasonic and Franke for any issues, including a 24-hour hotline service for minimal downtime. Securely connected to the internet for remote monitoring of machine health and ingredient levels status, the intelliCafé lets you know when action is needed via automatic text and email messaging.

Even in times of a pandemic when traditional coffee shops may close, the intelliCafé is available for guests with contactless order and payment options.

Canopy Point Coffee is a TechFW client.

Voices writer Lauren Acton is the marketing director of TechFW, a Dallas Innovates partner organization.

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R E A D   N E X T

Lauren Acton is Marketing Director at TechFW and Cowtown Angels Creatively and strategically, Acton figures out who a company is, elevates its brand identity, increases awareness of it, and connects i(...)