Grease, steam and a 6am stock count — one device family for counter, kitchen and storeroom.
Food-service hardware lives a different life from office IT: it is wiped with degreaser, used with wet hands and dropped behind the pass. The buying decision usually sits with the group's operations manager, who wants one device that runs the inventory app at 6am, survives the kitchen pass at noon and is cheap enough to deploy per outlet.
F&B groups, QSR franchise operators, central kitchens and catering companies standardising inventory hardware across outlets.
Grease film on the screen, steam in the ports, drops onto tile. A sealed Android tablet with a glove-capable screen lasts the franchise cycle.
Counts must be fast and quiet, scanning crate labels and shelf tags in low light, then synced before the first order lands.
A panel PC at the pass survives steam and splashes where a wall-mounted consumer screen fogs and fails.
In food service the device is wiped down twice a shift, dropped on tile, and used by whoever is on the till. It has to be cleanable, boring and always charged.
This is the part that decides the device. Each step below has a different requirement for screen size, scan engine and connectivity.
Same workflow, same failure points, different scale. The kit column is what was actually deployed.
42 kitchens
Food service
Delivery checked against the order at the door; invoice matched the same morning.
8-inch tablet on the receiving bench
8 h → 30 min
Retail & apparel
Full stock-take of a two-floor store, done before opening instead of after closing.
UHF RFID handheld + fixed reader at the stockroom door
10 M parcels / day
Parcel & logistics
Sortation reads at belt speed; no manual re-scan when a label is creased.
Pistol-grip UHF reader + vehicle terminal on the tugThe questions that come up on almost every project in this sector, answered before the first call.
All questionsSend the workflow and the software stack. You will get two models and the caveats, not a catalogue.
