The Cleveland Browns, along with caterers Aramark Sports + Entertainment, are officially launching a new beer-purchasing process at First Energy Stadium that will use facial authentication technology to speed up the age-verification and transaction process.
Called “Cleveland Cold Ones,” the offering is an extension of the Browns’ Express Access facial authentication program, which has been using Wicket technology for ticket verification at the stadium. By opting in to the system’s age-verification process, fans at First Energy Stadium will be able to order beverages through a mobile app, and then go to any one of 14 stands around the stadium where they simply scan their face for age and order verification — and then quickly walk away with their order.
According to Aramark and the Browns, the program also uses mobile-app platform technology from TapIn2 as well as an age-verification system developed by a company called IDmission. To sign up for the Cleveland Cold Ones system, fans must upload pictures of the front and back of their government-issued ID, as well as a selfie. All that information is used by the system to generate a computer value that verifies a person’s age, when matched with a live face. According to Wicket, the photos and selfies are not stored anywhere in its local systems, to help protect fans from identity theft.
According to the Browns, while the official launch of the system is at the Oct. 31 Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals, the team has been running a small test pilot of the Wicket-powered Cold Ones program at games earlier this season, and has gotten many positive reviews.
“One customer during the test pilot said every time he came up, there never was any line,” said Brandon Covert, vice president for information technology at the Browns, in a phone interview. Covert, who also oversees technology operations for other venues and teams under the Haslam Sports Group umbrella, has been an early believer in facial authentication systems for speeding up things like stadium entry, club space verification, and now, quick beer purchases.
According to Covert the Browns’ ticketing program now has more than 21,000 fans enrolled, and the team is already seeing as many as 10 percent of the fans on any given game day using the system. By combining the facial authentication ticketing with Evolv’s Express walk-through weapons detection systems for security scanning, Browns fans are seeing the future of stadium entry in action, where the entire process takes seconds instead of minutes. Stay tuned for a longer profile of stadium use of Wicket’s products in our upcoming Stadium Tech Report Fall issue!
