AoFrio iQ: What a year of real customer use cases taught us about managing cooler fleets

A year ago, we switched on AoFrio iQ for our first customers. Since then, we’ve conducted more than thirty trials with leading food and beverage companies worldwide, sharpening our understanding of how data-driven insights help customers sell more cold beverages, and continuously improving our platform in turn. This is what a year of using AoFrio iQ to monitor real connected refrigeration fleets has taught us.

Knowing where your coolers are is the first step to selling more

For every customer trying to manage a large fleet of geographically dispersed coolers, understanding exactly where their assets are is a top priority. To sell cold drinks effectively, a cooler must be in the right place, running at the right temperature, and stocked with the right product. Yet an estimated 6% of cooler fleets go missing each year — a significant cost burden for beverage brands.

That is the gap AoFrio iQ closes. Customers can use our platform to understand the location of every connected cooler in their fleet. If an individual unit has been unplugged, a rechargeable backup battery in SCS 800 can keep it visible for up to 30 days. When a cooler shows up somewhere it shouldn’t, AoFrio iQ raises an alert on a dashboard with an action list attached. From that same screen, a customer can log the new outlet or reassign the asset, instead of updating a spreadsheet somewhere else. And if the move was never authorized, they can disable the cooler remotely, which gives more leverage to a beverage bottler dealing with a non-compliant retailer.

This has been one of the most widely used features in our AoFrio iQ platform, and one where customers are already seeing tangible benefits. One customer, for example, used our solution to recover over half of their missing coolers, dramatically reducing lost asset costs. This kind of saving directly addresses the number one challenge most beverage brands face today.

Keeping coolers running, costs less than fixing them

Intermittent faults are brutal to diagnose in the field, and more than one customer told us it wasn’t unusual to send a technician out two or three times for the same faulty unit before finding the cause.

AoFrio iQ lets a customer diagnose and perform remedial actions remotely without a technician needing to be physically present on site. It also flags early warning signs, like short-cycling or a defrost fault, before they turn into bigger problems.

This has been a proven measure to slash servicing costs from each cooler, while creating a more resilient fleet, even those operating in harsh conditions. Fewer callouts and less failures mean less costs to absorb by the fleet manager, as well as improving the retail experience by eliminating downtime.

One of our customers in Colombia, who used the combination of our hardware and AoFrio iQ insights to improve performance of coolers located in hot and dusty environments, was able to lift the ROI on their servicing costs by more than 767%. This is a great example of how beverage bottlers are using AoFrio’s solution to prevent equipment failures and reduce downtime, with a more proactive and intelligent approach to maintenance.

Tracking door swings can optimize sales

Door swing data is an accurate and valuable way to determine which coolers — and which locations — are driving the most sales. By collating door swing activity across an entire fleet, beverage bottlers can layer these insights against campaign and seasonal events to model and predict commercial performance, staying ahead of demand. This intelligence at the point of contact with the consumer helps commercial and trade marketing teams understand how cooler positioning influences sales, so they can deploy coolers in the optimum environments to sell more cold beverages.

One customer used door swing activity to identify high- and low-performing cooler assets, then strategically adjusted cooler placements ahead of a major global sporting event to meet consumer demand. Insights from each event went on to inform restocking approaches, replacing guesswork with real activity data to prioritize stock replenishment.

Selling more cold drinks relies on smarter decision-making. By surfacing detailed trends and performance data, AoFrio iQ is helping our customers make more informed decisions when it comes to optimising cooler placement and performance.

Accurate energy efficiency = sustainability benchmarking

One feature that we think will become increasingly important for beverage brands is AoFrio iQ’s ability to measure whole-fleet cooler power draw directly, rather than modelling it from compressor runtime. Combined with variable speed control and automated eco modes, beverage brands can adjust energy settings and store hours across an entire fleet without a single site visit, and report actual consumption by store and by model.

For brands that operate refrigeration assets in their own retail outlets, this is an effortless way to lower energy bills at the point of sale. And as Scope 3 emissions reporting becomes a bigger part of how food and beverage brands account for their footprint, having accurate, cooler-level energy data makes it far easier to report against, and meet, sustainability targets.

What’s coming next

Refrigeration fleets are producing more data every year. New cellular controllers like AoFrio’s SCS 800 bring always-on connectivity, allowing customers to see and act on insights with greater immediacy. We’re also experimenting with camera technology, adding a further layer of data generated by each smart cooler. Together, this means larger, richer datasets and the ability to benchmark a fleet against its own history.

With AoFrio iQ capturing more signals from connected coolers every moment, we’ve also been considering how to help customers get the most out of that data with personalised insights and reporting.

This is why AoFrio has built Ask iQ, our new AI enabled feature that will make it even easier to get the answers our customers need from AoFrio iQ. AoFrio iQ customers will be able to ask a plain-language question about their own fleet, in their own words, and get an answer back from their own data instantly. How many coolers are in the wrong location? Which outlets have the highest door-open rates this week? Which coolers are at risk of failing in the next 30 days? As fleets grow and connectivity improves, the questions worth asking will keep changing, and Ask iQ is built to keep up with them.

We are really proud of the progress we have made with AoFrio iQ, and we think our customers are going to love using Ask iQ to get even more value out of the platform. With more data and better insights, the sky is the limit when it comes to getting more value from your connected cooler fleet.

Learn more about Ask iQ here.