When going to a conveyor belt or kaiten sushi restaurants, you sometimes are concerned with that you get good and fresh made sushi. You definately don’t want something that has been sitting on that conveyor belt for hours… This is the story of a guy that wanted to solve that issue. When James Allard lived in Japan as a student in the 1990s, he frequented kaiten sushi restaurants. The problem he observed was that dishes stayed on the belt too long, losing freshness and becoming unappetizing.

So when Allard and a partner opened their first kaiten-style Blue C Sushi restaurant in Seattle in 2003, they implemented a bar-code system that notified them when a plate had been on the conveyor more than 90 minutes, so they could remove it. But he did not stop there. We live in the age of computers… So in 2006, following the lead of Wal-Mart, the Department of Defense, and other large enterprises, tiny Blue C Sushi installed RFID technology so it could precisely monitor which dishes people were buying, at what time of day, and how long they stayed on the conveyor belt.

The system, now running in two locations, consists of RFID tags made by 3M fixed on the bottom of each plate, Intermec RFID readers and antennas, Microsoft’s BizTalk RFID event processing platform, and Ebisu inventory management software from local integrator Kikata. RFID antennas are placed at the chefs’ cutting boards so they can designate which dish goes on which plate, and also around the conveyor belt to read tag information from the passing plates. From this information again they could build a database that records time of day and year and what people want, and that way getting better demographics on consumption!

So now - each chef has a touchscreen display that shows what’s selling in real time, automates the billing process, resulting in fewer errors on customer’s checks and fewer unpaid bills.

A typical win win invention!

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