HotSchedules, a provider of cloud-based mobile technology for the restaurant and hospitality industry, has partnered with Kitchen Brains to take commercial kitchens to the next level…thanks to IoT.
Kitchen Brains currently deploy timing and control devices in restaurants, which integrate wirelessly across all cooking equipment, as well as connecting the front and back of house together. Step by step the company is making smart commercial kitchens a reality, through both the devices it provides and the SaaS apps it provides to manage them.
The partnership will see Kitchen Brains’ Quality Production Manager (QPM) integrate with the HotSchedules IoT Platform. The QPM application integrates cooking appliances such as fryers and ovens with real-time point-of-sale (POS) data. They system then plans, directs, and reports cooking instructions to ensure that food is always hot, fresh and available for guests. The companies hope that Hot Schedules’ IoT Platform will ease the complexity and costs of connecting QPM to other restaurant technologies.
The HotSchedules IoT platform will collect QPM’s data on food quality, wastage, inventory consumption, speed of service and savings. The data can then be delivered via the cloud to including HotSchedules’ Reveal, an analytics app that provides insights for hospitality businesses on a smartphone, tablet or browser. The data can also be linked to HotSchedules’ Inventory, a mobile application that enables restaurants to efficiently track and manage inventory and queue orders for products that are below ideal quantities.
“The integration plans, directs, and reports cooking instructions to ensure that food is always hot, fresh and available for guests,” said Hot Schedules in a statement. “The IoT Platform will eliminate the complexity and costs of connecting QPM to other restaurant technologies especially POS systems.”
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IoT security in the kitchen
At last year’s Infosecurity Europe show, Ken Munro, partner at ethical hacking firm Pen Test Partners demonstrated the security vulnerabilities of IoT devices, especially those designed for use in kitchens. Speaking to Internet of Business, he highlighted the point that while kitchens don’t necessarily offer intrinsic value to potential hackers, they could serve as weak points to gain access into a home network.
He said “Who would want to hack a coffee machine or a kettle? So what if someone could access and boil your kettle? But this misses the bigger picture, which is that IoT devices can be used as weak points to attack the far more valuable target – the home network – and give the attacker full access to the data held there, such as other account log-in details. The WiFi Kettle could also be used with other online resources, from geolocation sites to social media, to pinpoint targets located in the physical world. It’s this hyper-connected element, where every object talks to another object, that creates weaknesses that can be exploited and used to access other valuable data.”