COSTA COFFEE
Product Leadership, Development and Operations Partner through Acquisition
Briggo was founded in 2009 to sell coffee at automated kiosks. First installed on the University of Texas campus in 2011, the company grew rapidly to expand its footprint to airports, medical facilities, convention centers, retail stores and more.
In 2020, Coca-Cola subsidiary Costa Coffee purchased Briggo to accelerate the company’s innovation around fully autonomous, touchless specialty coffee solutions. The rebranded Costa Coffee BaristaBots can create 100 custom whole-bean drinks in an hour, showcasing that the machine is about more than great coffee – it’s about efficient, reliable technology.
Opportunity
Even prior to Briggo’s acquisition by Costa Coffee, the company was looking to ensure that its technology was robust enough to withstand continued success and growth. That said, Briggo was not interested in building a large in-house tech team, nor were they ready for the expense of a large, multi-disciplinary consulting shop. They wanted a partner with proven experience building clean, comprehensive code – a partner that could expand and contract its involvement with the brand depending on whether major software development or basic maintenance and support was needed. In 2018, they found that partner in SevenPico.
A Solution for Briggo
SevenPico’s analysis of Briggo’s product systems showed the need for a full cloud and retail software migration to ensure reliability, scalability, and cost optimization. Working directly with Briggo’s hardware and hardware control teams to ensure a seamless experience, SevenPico rebuilt Briggo’s product systems on a robust cloud architecture that has been continuously operating since 2018. In addition, SevenPico worked directly with Briggo’s data analytics group to offer access to real-time operational and sales data.
"SevenPico was there when we needed them as a small startup, and continues to help our business scale. Knowing that they can handle everything from ongoing support to major feature requests frees up my team to focus on everything else."
Growing with Costa
SevenPico’s relationship with Briggo did not end upon the company’s acquisition by Costa Coffee / Coca-Cola in 2020. On the contrary, Costa saw the benefit of SevenPico’s full service, no waste “Software Development as a Service” model, and tasked SevenPico with maintaining, augmenting, and continuing to operate the Briggo system.
Over the course of several years, SevenPico has continued to partner with Costa for its many mission critical technology needs. Along with providing project management and team leadership, SevenPico has designed, built, and operated the following:
- Cloud-native robotic restaurant system
- State machine for machine control system
- Robot to cloud telemetry system and user interface
- Scalable AWS infrastructure
Continued Partnership
SevenPico’s most recent software builds have now moved into market testing and production at Costa. But the shift does not mark the end of this long standing partnership. Costa plans to continue to work with SevenPico for future IoT, cloud services, and data infrastructure needs for the foreseeable future.
Background
In 1971 two brothers, Bruno and Sergio, moved to London. Coming from Italy, they were disappointed with the coffee they tasted. ‘Why are you settling for mediocre?’ they asked. And the Costa dream was born. From tiny beans, great big Mochas grow, and for 13 consecutive years, we were voted the UK’s favourite coffee shop. Since being bought by The Coca Cola Company in 2019 our global growth mission commenced. We now have over 3,800 stores across 32 countries and over 8,300 Costa Express self-service units.