Some Takeaways About Touchscreens
Can’t believe we haven’t imported this idea to Australia. Or if we have, why it’s not more popular — pizza vending machines… big in France.
Adial has been building pizza vending machines since 2002. Its Pizzadoor machine is designed for installation in rest areas, truck stops, limited service hotels, hospitals, offices, and railway stations. It is also widely used by pizza restaurants in smaller municipalities in France, which can’t justify extended opening hours. Product is stored in a cooling unit, and carefully dispenses in order of age to minimise wastage. Customers can choose a hot pizza to eat straight away, or cold to cook and consume at home. Cooked pizzas are heated in a pulsed warm air oven delivering brown and crunchy pizzas in just three minutes, and are supplied in a hygienic, food grade cardboard box.
Adial’s original Pizzadoor design used mechanical selection buttons alongside a colour LCD screen to present appealing images of the product inside. However, Vincent Le Gouic, President of Adial, noticed that users were increasingly trying to touch the screens when choosing a pizza.
TOUCH MY PIZZA
Enter Zytronic, a leader in durable, high performance Projected Capacitive Technology touch sensors.
Vincent Le Gouic explains, “Pizza is the best-selling fast food in France. As a nation, we consume 16 pizzas for every hamburger. We need to be up to date in terms of the customer experience, especially as almost all our customers now have tablets and smartphones. As a consequence, they expect to be able to interact with other screens in exactly the same way. Therefore, we contacted Eurocomposant with a view to offering a touch screen enabled version of Pizzadoor.”
Delphine Haton, of Eurocomposant, explains the challenging nature of the application. “The quality of the touch performance and the dependability of the screens needed to be very high, as snack foods such as pizzas can often be impulse purchases and customers will walk away if the interaction with the system is unreliable or difficult.”
Zytronic ticked all of the boxes for Adial, explained Delphine Haton, “Zytronic provides an outstanding solution for this kind of self-service application. We have had considerable experience of using its touchscreens in outdoor, public locations, exposed to the weather, extreme temperatures and the risk of vandalism and abuse. The quality of its touch performance is also exceptional – they genuinely provide a tablet-like performance, even on a large format touch screen.”
PROFIT: PIE CHART
Mr Le Gouic continues, “The touch screen enabled version of Pizzadoor has proved extremely popular, and now accounts for the majority of the machines sold.”
Zytronic provided a 31.5-inch diagonal, dual-touch Zybrid touch sensor featuring a durable 6mm thick anti-glare glass, with a custom printed black border. Zytronic also laminates UV blocking and IR blocking filters to the rear of the touchscreens for the purely outdoor version of the pizza vending machine, enhancing the protection for the LCD behind.
As a consequence of the success of the touchscreen enabled Pizzadoor vending machine, Adial’s revenue has grown by over 30% per annum over the last four years.
Zytronic: www.zytronic.co.uk