Description
The Challenge
A Sydney bakery needed a faster way to serve customers during peak periods. A conventional cashier creates a single queue: staff must take each order, collect the product, and process payment before moving to the next customer. When demand surges, that service point becomes a bottleneck.
The bakery wanted to increase throughput without separating self-service sales from its existing production and replenishment workflow.
The Breadwall Solution
The bakery combined one K180-6C touchscreen kiosk with two L180-10C smart locker cabinets and calls the installation its breadwall.
The three connected cabinets provide 26 compartments in total: six in the kiosk and ten in each locker cabinet. Customers browse the available bakery products, pay at the touchscreen, and collect their purchase from the compartment that opens.
The installation is positioned between the customer area and the bakery’s back-of-house workspace:
- Customers purchase from the front, so buying can move through the self-service workflow without relying on a cashier to retrieve every order.
- Bakery staff refill from the back, replenishing compartments directly from the production side without entering the customer queue.
- The lockers act as a peak-hour buffer, holding finished products between baking and collection so production and customer demand do not need to move at exactly the same pace.
Why It Serves More Customers
The breadwall separates three jobs that a staffed counter normally performs one at a time: product replenishment, customer selection and payment, and order collection. Staff can keep loading fresh stock from behind while customers complete purchases at the front.
This gives the bakery a higher-capacity sales channel during busy periods while keeping staff focused on baking, replenishment, and customer service where it is most valuable.
A Model for Other QSR Businesses
The same front-of-house/back-of-house pattern can work in other quick-service restaurant (QSR) environments where products are prepared continuously and demand arrives in waves, including:
- Cafés handling breakfast and commuter rushes
- Sandwich, salad, and ready-meal outlets during lunch peaks
- Pizza, burger, and takeaway kitchens staging prepaid orders
- Food halls and high-volume venues that need a compact pickup buffer
Compartment sizes, cabinet count, payment flow, and software can be configured around the menu and expected peak volume. The core principle remains the same: refill from the production side, sell and collect from the customer side.
