Apex Technology Solves Challenges Like Mobile Order Security, Space Limitations and More
MASON, OH (September 4, 2024) – Five years ago, smart food locker pioneer Apex Order Pickup Solutions became one of the first companies to bring contactless order pickup to a college campus. In the years since, colleges and universities around the country have leveraged Apex solutions to increase food options, staff efficiencies and dining revenues as well as implement new foodservice models that are transforming the campus dining landscape.
Results have included a 97% successful pickup rate and more than 1.3 million orders picked up from campuses in the last school year – all thanks to the ability of Apex smart lockers to optimize mobile order management, meet student demand for more diverse food offerings, and provide food access outside of dining halls and food courts.
Apex technology is making it possible for campuses to:
- Fuel growth in retail dining. Apex lockers are helping many schools enhance their retail dining by enabling brands to take advantage of efficiency and security benefits not previously available. With lockers offering fast and frictionless pickup of mobile orders via a scanned code, Apex allows campus dining services to reevaluate staffing needs, prevent long pickup lines at the counter, and reduce mix-ups and thefts requiring order remakes to near zero. These benefits also help build students’ interest in eating on campus, helping grow schools’ foodservice revenues.
- Expand food options without restaurant buildouts. Some campus dining services are hampered in their efforts to expand their food offerings by a lack of space. Schools are increasingly solving this problem by installing a floor-to-ceiling wall of smart lockers that functions both as a self-serve pickup location and a branded storefront, using a ghost kitchen to prepare online orders behind the scenes. No traditional service counter, kitchen or front-of-house staff is required, enabling the team to fit a new restaurant concept into the existing dining footprint.
- Serve multiple student gathering spots from a single food court. In some cases, Apex lockers are being used to create a hub and spoke system enabling food to be delivered from any restaurant in a central food court to other locations on campus. Mobile orders placed from a recreation center or other secondary location are picked up by bicycle courier and deposited in lockers at the order site for secure retrieval, saving time for students without the overhead of another restaurant buildout or extra on-site food staff.
Innovations like these add to the other benefits of smart food lockers, including less-than-10-second pickup of mobile orders, fewer bad customer experiences, higher throughput during peak hours, and valuable data on metrics such as order make time, dwell time and pickup time that can be used to further optimize operations.
In fact, Apex’s automated food pickup lockers are becoming such an essential component of college and university foodservice programs that schools are beginning to build their dining renovation plans around them.
“We’re seeing some of our C&U customers redevelop dining programs to replace traditional storefronts with food lockers, close dining halls on weekends and instead use lockers for food access, and even rebuild their make lines to adapt to locker locations,” said Ashley McNamara, Vice President, Global Marketing, at Apex. “Combined with mobile ordering and ghost kitchens, smart food lockers are fundamentally changing C&U foodservice, and both students and foodservice operators are reaping the benefits.”