In November 2024, the Avenir Centre, a premier sports and entertainment venue in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, partnered with Dispension to launch the latest in self-serve technology to enhance its food and beverage offering.
Food and Beverage Director, Chris McEachern, who spearheads concessions operations for ASM Global at the Avenir Centre, shared his perspective on how Dispension’s beer robots, SmartServ, have addressed critical staffing challenges, enhanced the guest experience, and provided an innovative solution to the beer concessions world.
Staffing Challenges
A key point Chris raised is that “F&B is going through a labor crunch”. Persistent challenges with a casual and high-turnover workforce have created operational bottlenecks and inefficiencies during events, resulting in sub-optimal throughput during limited selling windows.
Fragmented service has further impacted operational efficiency, revenue, and the guest experience, highlighting the need for a solution that reduces reliance on human labor.
Delivering a Modern Guest Experience
Recognizing the shift in consumer preferences towards self-serve options and the growing trend towards convenience, ASM Global and the Avenir Centre sought to elevate the guest experience with an innovative, engaging, and efficient self-service solution while ensuring compliance with local laws and regulations.
Aligning with its mandate to deliver innovative guest experiences through technology, ASM Global recognized the benefits of integrating Dispension’s cutting-edge technology to enhance service delivery, fan engagement, and guest satisfaction.
Automated Beer Robots
Together with ASM Global, Dispension deployed automated beer robots at the Avenir Centre to address their challenges. The beer robots feature advanced capabilities, including real-time biometric age verification to ensure compliance with liquor licensing requirements, integrated can-opening functionality, and a user-friendly design to meet the venue’s operational needs.
By tailoring the workflow to the Avenir Centre’s goals, Dispension’s solution successfully reduced staffing inefficiencies while enhancing the overall guest experience with faster, more reliable service.
Ease of Implementation
Dispension’s SmartServ beer robots offer a seamless, turnkey solution designed to integrate effortlessly into any stadium concessionaire’s operations. While the solution is ready to deploy with minimal setup, Dispension recognizes that every venue has unique workflows and requirements.
By delivering a turnkey solution and a tailored onboarding, Dispension ensures SmartServ aligns perfectly with operational workflows and needs—providing a convenient service, enhancing fan experiences, decreasing reliance on casual staff, and increasing revenue.
Turnkey Solution, Tailored Onboarding
The implementation process involved close collaboration between Dispension and the Avenir Centre team, ensuring a smooth integration of the machines into existing operations. Chris noted Dispension’s responsiveness and professionalism throughout the process, which contributed significantly to the success of the initiative.
As a turnkey, scalable solution, educating and training staff was no issue. “The ability to keep them stocked and have them used by frontline employees is simple and quite easy for people to understand.”
Improved Operational Reliability and Efficiency
SmartServ’s verified ID checks and can-opening system reduced the reliance on human labor, ensuring uninterrupted service during peak selling windows. Dispension's beer robots decreased line congestion and increased throughput, capturing revenue that would otherwise be lost during limited selling windows.
Additionally, SmartServ enhanced compliance with liquor licensing regulations through its robust ID verification process, proven to be more accurate and reliable than human ID checks.
Enhanced Guest experience
Unlike traditional beer fridges, SmartServ’s refrigeration system remains closed and sealed throughout service, ensuring consistently ice-cold beers that redefine product quality for stadium guests. The beer robots quickly gained praise for their speed, convenience, and ease of use, with an unexpected benefit emerging after launch: no prompt to tip.
As tipping fatigue continues to grow, guests—particularly season-ticket holders—welcomed this feature, retaining more disposable income for additional discretionary spending on concessions, and team merchandise, ultimately enhancing their overall experience and boosting revenues for ASM Global.
“One reason we’re drawn to the technology is the ability to be less reliant on casual staff”
“One of the driving forces is to create a more seamless experience for the guest. And SmartServ technology is a big part of that”
Low Barrier, Easy to Adopt
As a brand-new product offering for stadium fans, Chris wasn’t sure how a predominantly older and cash-carrying fanbase would react to the cashless, self-serve beer robots before the launch.
It quickly became apparent that this wouldn’t be a challenge or barrier. “One of the things that has been the most impressive about SmartServ is how seamlessly most of our patrons have been able to interact with it, with very little guidance... on their 1st interaction. I haven't any significant barriers to entry at all. It's a very seamless interaction and interface, and it's very simple for our guests to understand.”
Preliminary data shows that guests from all demographics are using SmartServ, with a blend of both males and females ranging from ages 19 to 81, with more than 20% of sales coming from guests over 50.
Creating Additional POS and Maximizing ROI
Stadium venues are stuck with small amounts of time to drive sales within their short selling windows. By optimizing unused floorspace and creating additional points of sale, stadium operators can improve operational efficiencies and boost return on investment of their entire concourse operations.
For concessionaires and stadium operators, short selling windows also make it essential to optimize the customer transaction process. Creating more entry points for customers to access products is crucial. But it’s equally important to ensure these transactions are processed quickly and efficiently, as this directly impacts the venue’s ability to maximize revenue within short selling windows.
“There has been a lot of excitement, a lot of good feedback about these machines”
“SmartServ allows me to increase the points of sales within my building and utilize spaces that would be challenging for me to have other point of sale setups available. That increases speed of service and reduces any barrier to entry.”
Data Insights and Analytics
In addition to SmartServ’s main benefits, the machines also capture valuable, non-personally identifiable demographic and transactional data, offering untapped potential for marketers and advertisers.
By knowing where fans are travelling from, to how much they typically spend per transaction, to the types of payment cards they’re using, Dispension’s beer robots add an additional layer of marketing intelligence, data, and audience insights, previously not available to stadium operators and concessionaires.
Sku Sales by Average Age by Gender:
Sku Sales by Eye Color:
Central source of Truth
Dispension’s beer robots not only tackle the painful challenges of long lines, concourse congestion, and staffing shortages—they're also paired with a powerful software dashboard. This platform streamlines operations with real-time inventory management, transaction tracking, and advanced analytics, supporting Accounting, Warehouse, and Inventory teams.
Additionally, marketers can tap into the data analytics to glean valuable consumer intelligence to drive further revenue opportunities and improve the fan experience.With robust data insights, operators gain valuable marketing intelligence to drive revenue and improve the fan experience.
To ensure seamless integration into their workflow, Dispension collaborated with ASM Global to connect the dashboard with Clover Sport, their enterprise POS system, creating a unified, centralized platform for all concessions data to maintain their central source of truth.
Transactions by Returning Guests:
Guest Location by Zip:
Dispension’s smart beer robots have proven instrumental in overcoming staffing challenges, elevating the guest experience, and supporting the Avenir Centre’s operational goals.
Through seamless collaboration and innovative technology, the partnership has set a benchmark for success within ASM Global’s venues. The shared commitment to excellence continues to drive value for both organizations, ensuring a bright future for SmartServ and ASM Global.
