Redefining Coffee Experiences with AI-Powered Smart Cafés

Home Success Stories Redefining Coffee Experiences with AI-Powered Smart Cafés

Customer Background

The world’s second-largest coffee chain set out to elevate the coffee experience for U.S. customers during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure safety, convenience, and consistency, Costa Coffee introduced smart cafés, which are AI-powered autonomous coffee vending machines capable of delivering café-quality beverages in just 90 seconds, 24/7.

Sigma Solve partnered with the coffee chain to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and the familiar convenience of a traditional café, enabling a seamless, automated, and scalable coffee experience.

Industry

Food & Beverages

The Challenges

The company aimed to deliver barista-quality coffee at scale through autonomous machines, which is an ambitious goal that presented multiple technical and operational challenges:

  • Designing an event-driven system to instruct machines to prepare perfect coffee autonomously
  • Managing real-time inventory, refills, and machine health with minimal downtime
  • Building and maintaining scalable frontend systems for kiosks and mobile applications
  • Overcoming testing bottlenecks through script-based workflow automation
  • Planning complex infrastructure and deployment for AI-powered machines
  • Integrating real-time data analytics for inventory, sales, and operational insights
  • Ensuring security, reliability, and operational continuity across locations
  • Developing a data reporting module to support sales and marketing strategies

The Solutions

Sigma Solve assembled a specialized team of AI, cloud, and DevOps experts to deliver a fully automated, cloud-based retail ecosystem for the company’s smart cafés.

Key solution components included:

  • AI-powered autonomous vending system enabling café-quality coffee delivery in 90 seconds
  • Hexagonal Architecture to enable seamless communication between components and support event-driven instructions
  • Event-based APIs to trigger refills, reduce downtime, and ensure uninterrupted operations
  • Headless architecture using ReactJS, later transitioned to Retool, ensuring modular, cost-effective frontend development
  • Automated QA testing using Postman collections for rapid, script-based validation
  • DevOps-driven deployment automation leveraging Node.js APIs, AWS services (including S3), and scripting tools
  • Slack-integrated deployment alerts for faster response and minimal manual intervention
  • Cloud-based data storage and analytics for inventory, sales, and machine performance tracking
  • Advanced data reporting and analytics to gain customer insights and optimize marketing strategies

The Outcomes

Sigma Solve helped the coffee brand successfully deploy AI-driven smart cafés that delivered speed, safety, and scalability, which transformed how customers experienced coffee during and beyond the pandemic.

The partnership delivered measurable business and operational impact during a critical time:

Enabled contactless, on-the-go coffee access with consistent quality

Significantly reduced human intervention and labor costs

Reduced testing time to 15–20 minutes using automated Postman collections

Delivered an end-to-end automation solution, cutting operational costs by hundreds of dollars

Improved inventory visibility, machine uptime, and sales tracking

Enhanced customer satisfaction through secure payments, speed, and reliability

Successfully addressed workforce challenges while maintaining premium customer experiences

Client Testimonial

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Sigma Solve Inc. has been the go-to company for our IT consulting projects. They have consistently delivered enterprise software solutions exceeding our clients' expectations while working within tight schedules and budgets. I highly recommend them.

Jeff Hillier

Affordable projects are completed on time as promised, always! Friendly, excellent communication. They have the best Project Manager and technology strategists. I have worked with Sigma Solve Inc. on many projects for years, and they never failed me. I will continue to work with them.

Andy Narendra

Sigma Solve Inc. is the best web development company I have ever worked with. They are highly responsive, and what is equally important is they care very much about the quality of their work. I highly recommend them.

Tim Krejdovsky