Equipment monitoring for dark kitchens
UpNorth Group · equipment monitoring, alerts and reporting, built and taken live
OpenKit built Kioti, the system UpNorth Group’s operations team uses to see every kitchen’s equipment on one screen. When the network drops mid-service, crews keep working on the kitchen tablet and nothing they log during the outage is lost.
Overview
UpNorth Group runs dark kitchens, delivery-only sites where every fridge, oven, prep station and holding cabinet is instrumented and has to work for food to go out on time. The tooling they had coped with a normal service but broke when the network dropped mid-service and the kitchen tablets disagreed with each other. A kitchen acting on stale temperatures is a food-safety risk. Their operations team also needed to see the patterns across every site at once.
UpNorth brought OpenKit in to build one system across iOS, Android and web for equipment monitoring, alerts and reporting, designed from the start for a network that fails mid-service.
1,000+
Equipment readings an hour, watched live across every site
99.9%
Uptime across UpNorth’s kitchens in live service
0
Workflows lost to a network drop
Approach
What OpenKit built
Kioti runs as native iOS and Android apps and a web operations console that share one state, with views for kitchen managers, engineers, panel operatives and area managers. Its data stays in the UK, under UK GDPR. The build started with the kitchen tablet, the hardest part to get right.
Kitchen tablets that keep working offline
Prep checklists, equipment checks and service workflows run on the kitchen tablet and carry on when the network goes. The tablet holds its own state through the outage and reconciles when the connection comes back, so a crew never repeats work or loses progress mid-service.
One view of every piece of equipment
Every fridge, oven and prep station reports into one equipment view, alongside gas, electricity and water monitoring. Each unit shows its own trend, so an operator can catch drift before it becomes a fault.
Alerts that reach the right person
Equipment drift, temperature excursions and safety triggers go to the right person at the right severity. Kioti tracks each alert from acknowledgement to resolution.
Reports and a HACCP-aligned audit trail
Daily and weekly breakdowns show the operations team the patterns across kitchens. Monthly fault reports track equipment faults and callouts at each site. Kioti also keeps a HACCP-aligned audit trail the safety team can take into a conversation with a regulator.
Result
Kioti in live service
Kioti runs live across UpNorth’s kitchens at 99.9% uptime. Each role works from its own view, whether that is a tablet on the kitchen floor or the console that covers every kitchen.
The year after launch, UpNorth came back to extend Kioti across every site, adding area-manager views and utilities reporting.
Voice
What UpNorth said
Working with OpenKit proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and collaborative experience; they were quick to adapt to industry specific challenges and applied their expertise in software development to deliver an enterprise grade full stack IOT solution. I was impressed with how creatively they were able to produce solutions when faced with complex and unexpected scenarios.
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