How home-grown F&B brands boost revenue with tech upgrades

When local bubble tea chain PlayMade was getting ready to launch its green grape and white peach oolong series last month, it turned to a powerful ally for help: its generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) tool.

With a few prompts from the marketing team, the tool produced tasty descriptions of the drinks, social media captions and other content, all in a few minutes.

This was a far cry from the past, when the team and co-founder Amanda Poo, 35, herself racked their brains over the marketing materials for its new products every four to six weeks.

She recalls: “I spent days every month doing research to brainstorm trendy catchphrases, checking the materials’ spelling and grammar, changing the images’ color, and making sure everything fit our fun brand voice.

“Now, with the Gen AI software, the team can do all the work on their own, and quickly. I don’t worry that an employee might get our brand voice wrong when I’m on leave, and I have more time to focus on things like our customer service, and market insights and customer data to predict demand for new drinks.”

PlayMade adopted the solution with grant support from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) through the Gen AI Sandbox initiative, which helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) leverage Gen AI in their businesses.

Gen AI is just one example of how Ms Poo and her cousin-in-law and co-founder Crystal Wee, 38, have used digital tools to solve problems and realize their dream of scaling their business.

It now spans 26 outlets in Singapore and three in Malaysia.

When they set up PlayMade in 2017, their work was tedious. “We were dependent on manual processes,” Ms Poo says.

With customers needing time to choose from many options, queues snaked, repelling people who were unwilling to wait.

Outlets reported their inventory via different platforms, requiring tedious compilation, and texted and called suppliers on their own to place orders.

Ms Poo adds: “We didn’t have any oversight until we got the invoices.”

Moreover, finance managers took up to five days monthly to organize sales data from the different outlets for reports, slowing analyses.

“We couldn’t have scaled with these manual processes,” she says.

A digital brew for expansion

When PlayMade opened its fourth outlet in 2018, Ms Poo and Ms Wee decided it was time to digitize. The company purchased self-service kiosks to automate ordering, later switching to hybrid systems that both patrons and staff can use.

During peak hours, customers can self-order through the hybrid system at the service counter while staff concentrate on making drinks. During non-peak periods, employees complete orders on their side of the system, maintaining customer engagement with a personal touch.

The founders opted for this technology after careful market research. It was also a pre-approved solution found on IMDA’s Chief Technology Officer-as-a-Service (CTO-as-a-Service), so PlayMade received grant support for half the cost.

Without grant support, Ms Poo notes, it would have taken the team longer to roll out the kiosks, and they may not have been able to implement the kiosk at all outlets, as that would have been very costly.