Wouldn’t it be great if your customers could know exactly when fresh product was about to hit your shelves? That’s what the Albion Café in London thought, too. Or, to be more specific, that’s what their customers across the street thought, before approaching the bakery with an ingenious solution. Those customers happened to be employees of Poke, a digital creative agency, who were rather candid about the fact that they initially had their own best interests at heart: “Perhaps selfishly, we wanted a way to get the freshest baked stuff first.”
To get the scoop about what’s new at the Albion Café, the agency created BakerTweet, a robust box that is designed to withstand bakery conditions and consists of a screen, a dial and a button. The box stores a list of the bakery’s products and preprogrammed messages with which it wirelessly updates the bakery’s Twitter feed. The product list and messages can be updated using a simple web interface. To let the bakery’s customers know what’s coming out of the oven, a baker turns the box’s dial to select the correct item and hits the button. The preprogrammed message associated with the item instantly appears on Twitter, sending a virtual whiff of fresh-baked bread wafting across the Internet. BakerTweet has been a hit with both the bakery and its customers, and other bakeries are looking at replicating its success with their own BakerTweets.