This startup ensures the local bar never runs out of your favorite beer

You walk into your friendly neighborhood bar at the end of a long, stressful day. All you want to do is kick back, relax, and savor a pint of your favorite lager. Your lips tremble in anticipation. Mild inebriation is just a couple of drinks away – just what you need to take the edge off.

But the bartender politely informs you that your poison of choice is no longer available. There were more customers than usual – and they drank all the booze. It’s a travesty. You’re shocked, upset, and on the verge of pulling your hair out. A dream has been quickly turned sour.

Luckily for us, this nightmare scenario could very well be a thing of the past if WeissBeerger has its way. The Tel Aviv-based startup is working on smart beer taps to build “connected bars.” It works with breweries and bars to provide real-time information and analytics that help with data driven decisions. Basically, if beer inventories are running low, WeissBeerger will step in.

“We love beer,” exclaims Omer Agiv, CEO of WeissBeerger. “The last ten years were filled with challenges for this industry as consumption went down […] People don’t want to drink five, six, ten pints a night.”

Beer in the cloud

Omer – an industrial engineer by profession – describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, with prior dabbling in ventures related to enterprise tech, mobile, and analytics. He says WeissBeerger is a perfect example of using an online solution to solve an offline problem. “The online world is saturated, there’s too much competition. But people are offline, and the trick is to connect the two,” he exhorts.

WeissBeerger’s product is a rectangular gizmo that can be attached to equipment such as beer taps and coolers. The device, which Omer says looks “a bit like Apple TV,” connects to the internet via 3G and wifi. It analyzes real-time data such as the amount of beer poured, frequency of orders, and existing stock levels and relays it back to a secure cloud server.

Omer claims this data allows for actionable analytics and optimized promotions. “For example, we see between 8 and 10 pm in Tokyo is the peak of consumption. We are able to show breweries and allow them to give instant discounts for more sales. Or we can alert the bar – hey your tap hasn’t been used much for the past 48 hours so the stock is probably stale. Best to replenish it,” he explains.

The entrepreneur is fervent in his explanation that this is a real problem for the brewery industry. The multi-billion dollar market is now on the wane as people become more health-conscious and shift preferences to craft beers. As a result, the market has become more saturated and companies are looking at acquisitions (the world’s top two beer manufacturers merged yesterday) to keep expanding their customer base. At the same time, they need to become leaner, more efficient, and improve the supply chain if they wish to keep profitability humming along.

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WeissBeerger’s device

A pint of big data