Kooky

Introduction

The realized concept of the user-friendly digital cup smart system is unparalleled. It emerged as a response to a surge in packaged to-go food during the COVID-19-related restrictions on the foodservice industry. The simplicity of the idea is genius:

Install the Kooky app. Get your drink in a Kooky cup, paying the drink plus a 1 CHF deposit, and add the Kooky cup to your account. Then grab it and go! Later, drop the empty cup off in one of the many Kooky boxes in Zurich or Basel. The cup adds to your account, getting your deposit back in a split second.

You may wonder what happens next with the central element of the system — the Kooky cup. The journey of a cup continues to the realm of the Kooky’s rinsing logistics. Cups are cleaned according to hygiene regulations and standards, picked, packed, and distributed to Kooky’s partners again.

One of the main goals of the company’s founders was to make recycling easier and more accessible both for the company’s partners and users.

Challenge

Kooky was looking for a trusted software development partner to help them deploy a coherent system to run the following workload exhaustively:

• organize work and workflows;
• provide end-to-end visibility into the whole project’s management;
• monitor payments, logistics, and inventory.

We were inspired by Kooky’s mission to impact the single-use plastic environmental scene and a long-term sustainability promotion. Many green businesses that attempt to enter the business world don’t last long. But Kooky is here to stay; therefore, the high demands for the software to power the project.

Kooky is the first user-oriented and fully digitalized system to cover metropolitan areas with its reusable cup solution. The team behind the idea thinks big, so our main challenge was to deliver a coherent system that would shoulder all the requirements to realize the ground-breaking ideas of the project’s founders.

The client contacted Redwerk, having a distinct vision of a final product. Our task was to design & implement its technical side. Given the complexity of the system and overwhelming deadlines, we started drafting the most advantageous architecture solutions already during the requirement gathering and analysis phase. To embody our client’s idea, we stayed flexible yet demanding to deliver a comprehensive product.

Solution

Redwerk professionals timely delivered a highly responsive solution to run the Kooky project. Our software package included:

• Web app
• API for Kooky Boxes
• API and backend development for a mobile app

Redwerk professionals digitalized the entire process of monitoring and managing system elements such as Kooky Boxes and Kooky Cups, no matter what scale.

We scrutinized the project’s business scenario and executed adequate steps to simplify the crucial business processes. Our cooperation with this green business resulted in a solution that covers the workflow of the operations center and the partners’ portal, powering the core processes.

Operations Center: Operations center staff now can quickly get all the necessary information on all the cups and boxes in the system, manage logistics, deliveries, money transfers, and coordinate partners and users.

Partners Portal: For the Kooky partners (representatives of restaurants, cafes, and coffee-to-go spots), the system allows them to manage the cup stocks remotely and edit all the information regarding their business in the system themselves.

For the Front-End development, we opted for Vue.js with the Vuetify UI framework. This technology stack allowed us to facilitate the whole process with a wide variety of ready-made tools for shared code organization Material UI design, used for both Partners Portal and Operations Center. On this project, about 70% of code is used in a shared Partners Portal and Operations Center project.

For the Back-End development, we selected the .NET Core Framework as a powerful and most suitable technology for working with the Azure cloud platform. Together with Kooky’s founders, we envision the project’s exponential growth, including all the integral elements of the expanding business, such as an increasing number of partners and consumers. Azure cloud was chosen as the most efficient option to host such a promising solution.

Using Azure gives us an option to host micro-service architecture in the simplest way — through using Kubernetes. Such an approach easies the services’ orchestration for better performance and troubleshooting high server loads.

Here is a condensed overview of the functionality we developed from scratch:

• Kooky Cups management. With our system, project partners (cafes, restaurants, co-working spaces, and coffee-to-go spots) can order and pay for cups, also managing their delivery.
• Batching. Cups are delivered in batches. The app enables intuitive batches’ forming and management through QR codes.
• Kooky Box synchronization. The platform allows users to add new Kooky Boxes (including the location) and monitor their operations. The system contains data on every Kooky Box, enabling operators to audit their actual storage capacity and technical characteristics.
• Interactive map. The map allows the users to locate Kooky partners as well as Kooky Boxes with all the actual information.
• Adding partners’ locations with Geocoding API. Google Geocoding API allows for an effortless address converting into geographic coordinates to place markers on a map.