No drop wasted: Kiwi company utilises AWS to power growth

Kiwi company Trickle, is committed to helping hospitality organisations and establishments in New Zealand to 'go green', utilising the services of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

More specifically, Trickle focuses on helping businesses reduce beer wastage.

According to the company, sustainability is top of mind for hospitality establishments throughout New Zealand, and the industry is increasingly open to new technology to minimise waste and maximise profitability.

Trickle developed a tool which captures every drop of beer poured to manage a beer's lifecycle throughout the business and maximise revenue.

By attaching a small device to beer lines in bars and restaurants, Trickle records data in real time, tracking every and any pour activity.

With the help of AWS, Trickle has turned this huge amount of data into value over the counter, identifying a 10-12% discrepancy across beverage usage versus sales, the company says.

While this data was initially stored via a local cloud service, Adrian Wills, founder of Trickle, says "At a certain point, I realised my local provider was not cost effective and couldn't provide me with the flexibility I needed.

"Plus, I had domains spread across different services, making it hard to capture data in a consistent way. In last twelve months, I've migrated large amounts of pour activity data to AWS DynamoDB, which has made all the difference," says Wills.

Recent company growth since the AWS migration has brought large customers to Trickle's doorstep, according to the company.

Wills says, "At first, I was scared to get a big customer too quickly, as I was already seeing problems in capturing data for our small customer base. Now that we're working with AWS, I have a system I can throw lots of data at without concern, and it will scale quickly and easily.

AWS NZ country manager Tim Dacombe-Bird says, "The capability, availability and scalability of AWS means small, local companies can grow quicker than ever before, at a fraction of the cost, and without disruption to the business.

"Trickle's migration to AWS has proven cost effective for the startup, allowing for optimal business growth while helping local New Zealand establishments to minimise wastage.

Trickle is currently servicing 128 taps in bars and restaurants across the country.