Digital Innovation of Collective Catering

With over 50 years of history and 13,000 employees, CIRFOOD is one of the largest Italian companies active in collective catering, commercial catering, and corporate welfare services.

CIRFOOD has always been oriented towards continuous innovation to promptly respond to new market needs. Indeed, CIRFOOD has relied on Mia-Platform excellence to expand its offer of welfare services for companies and to provide its employees with new digital tools for booking and paying meals at the office.

Industry: Food Services

Who is CIRFOOD?

Continuous innovation and growth

CIRFOOD was founded in the late 1950s in Reggio Emilia with the opening of the first inter-company canteen that served meals to the workers from the city’s companies. Over the years, CIRFOOD has continued to innovate and expand its business model, gaining leadership in the Italian school catering segment in the 1990s, and ultimately becoming the main player in the field of corporate welfare services. Today, CIRFOOD has a strong presence in 17 Italian regions, in Belgium and the Netherlands, producing 100 million meals per year.

“Feed the future”: innovation and sustainability

“Feed the future” is the philosophy that inspires CIRFOOD, following a sustainable development model from an economic, environmental, social, and cultural point of view. This principle is shared throughout the company and based on solid values: cooperation, dynamism, responsibility, authenticity, and imagination.

Innovation is one of the strategic levers that allows CIRFOOD to anticipate customers’ needs to ensure services that can improve the clients’ lifestyle and people’s well-being. For this reason, CIRFOOD constantly focuses on innovating processes, services, and products, opening up to new business opportunities to respond promptly to new market needs.

The goal

CIRFOOD had the goal of expanding its range of corporate catering services and providing a smart and flexible solution for the locations that do not have a restaurant, canteen or corporate kitchen.

For this reason, CIRFOOD launched the QUBì project, a fully customizable modular service consisting of four adjustable elements:

QUBì app

A handy app for placing orders and payments directly from a smartphone

Locker

A handy app for placing orders and payments directly from a smartphone

Food Market

A refrigerated corner with ready-to-eat meals that can be added to the company's cafeteria

Accessories

A set of furniture equipped with a microwave oven, tables, chairs, and appliances to complete the dining area

The client company has the opportunity to compose a tailor-made solution which, on the one hand, fits easily into the company’s available spaces and, on the other hand, adapts perfectly to the needs of its collaborators.

The QUBì project allows every company to open a real smart restaurant at the office, providing its employees with a wide range of options for their lunch break at work.

The solution

Analysis, design and implementation

After conducting an in-depth analysis of CIRFOOD’s needs and goals, Mia-Platform has developed several User Story Maps in a collaborative and agile way. The goal was to build functional user maps, focused both on the workers of the client companies and on CIRFOOD operators.

Based on the different User Story Maps, Mia-Platform has built a platform for CIRFOOD to digitize the management of reservations and meal payments through the construction of new digital touchpoints: the QUBì application, the website and the back-office space for CIRFOOD operators.

The QUBì app

Released with a time-to-market of only 4 months and available in a mobile version, the mobile App allows users to order, pay, and receive meals, which are delivered and stored in the Food Locker installed in the company spaces. With the QUBì App, users can:

Consult the menu of the day and the dishes available, with the possibility of filtering by allergens;
View the nutritional information of the dishes, divided into different categories;
Compose and place the order;
Select the lunch delivery time slot and the smart locker where to collect the order;
Pay by selecting a preferred payment service provider, using also discount vouchers or electronic meal vouchers.

Headless CMS

Customized on the basis of CIRFOOD’s needs, the Headless CMS allows CIRFOOD back-office users to:

Update the contents of the App in a simple and autonomous way, upload the new dishes with the related information (ingredients, photos, allergens and so on) and program the menu of each company to make visible only the dishes available for that location;
Manage orders with personalized services;
Monitor the references available and the quantities in stock;
Manage shipments, printing the labels to be affixed on the dishes that are delivered to the company.

Marco Campagna, Innovation & Strategy Director @CIRFOOD

“Our goal is to keep up with the evolving needs of companies and workers, in terms of consumption, flexibility, well-being, and safety. For this reason, we are committed to improving the quality and level of customization of our services every day. We have chosen Mia-Platform as a technology provider because it shares our same values for customer care, and has been able to create a flexible and solid digital platform for CIRFOOD, which allows us to provide new catering services “.

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