Over the past year and a half, there is no hotter stadium technology than the checkout-free concession stand. Join us as Zippin CEO Krishna Motukuri talks about why checkout-free is so popular, and why it may eventually replace all other forms of concession payments.
Over the past year and a half, there is no hotter stadium technology than the checkout-free concession stand. Allowing fans to enter a store by swiping a credit card, then to take whatever they want, and then just leave, has been enthusiastically accepted by both fans and venues, with stadium stores being added on almost a daily basis.
Joining us on the Stadium Tech Report podcast is Krishna Motukuri, CEO of Zippin, a San Mateo, Calif. startup that is leading the stadium checkout-free marketplace, with more stadium-specific stores than anyone else, including Amazon. Join us as Krishna talks about why checkout-free is so popular, and why it may eventually replace all other forms of concession payment — ONLY on the Stadium Tech Report podcast.
If you’ve been paying attention to our site, you will have noticed many, many stories lately about new checkout-free concession stands being deployed, from either Zippin or Amazon, the two leaders in the stadium-specific marketplace. They’re not the only players, though, with another company called AiFi starting to pick up stadium-store momentum and a cast of others looming on the sidelines.
“My co-founder (Motilal Agriwal, who is also Zippin’s chief scientist) had 20-plus years of experience in computer vision, which helped direct us,” Motukuri said. The two bets Zippin made when it started around 2015 — that component costs for materials like cameras would come down, and that deep learning would be the right way to build the AI engine — paid off, and by 2017 Motukuri said the company had a solution it felt good about. Zippin then opened a prototype store in its office using the technology, and opened it up for real customers — the first data set for building the AI. Then came the next step, getting more stores open to make the AI more powerful.
Stadiums a perfect place for rapid launches
“It was critical for us [at the beginning] to launch stores quickly, since the more stores we have the more the AI learns,” Motukuri said. “We needed to find a vertical that would embrace the technology.”
Stadiums, as it turned out, would be the right candidate. One of the big lifts with any new technology, Motukuri said, is to convince the end customer — in this case, the stadium fan — to try something different.
“One way to do that is to make the value so enormous that they can’t ignore it,” Motukuri said. When Zippin stores started appearing in stadiums, it didn’t take long for fans to vote with their dollars. Instead of spending unknown minutes in a line behind other people, at a checkout-free store they could swipe a card, grab a beer and be back to their seats in seconds. From pretty much every stadium we’ve talked to, checkout-free has been an instant win.
“That bet worked out very well for us,” Motukuri said.
And by focusing on stadiums, Zippin has staked out an early lead in the marketplace, well ahead of its closest competitor, the mighty retail giant Amazon and its similar Just Walk Out technology.
Different types of stores address different needs and price points
Showing perhaps its startup mentality Zippin was quick to pivot on its offerings to the stadium marketplace, adding a cheaper, easy-to-deploy version of its stores that focused mainly on drinks and snacks. The so-called “Zippin Lane,” Motukuri said, arrives at venues flat-packed “like an IKEA desk,” he joked, and could be up and running in a matter of weeks. Earlier this year Zippin introduced another format that uses equipment from an existing walk-up stand, layering the checkout technology on top for an even lower-cost solution.
And even as the company has hit some impressive milestones — according to Motukuri Zippin now has more than 100 stores open (62 of those in stadiums) that have served more than 2 million customers — the entire marketplace is just getting started, he said.
“It’s our estimate that most pro stadiums could handle around 20 Zippin stores each,” Motukuri said. Currently, the stadiums with the most stores are Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, which now has 10 Zippin stores after adding six this football offseason, and Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, which has nine. “If you do the math of roughly 100 pro stadiums in the U.S., that’s 2,000 potential stores just in sports.” Throw in places like airports and college campuses, where Zippin has some of its other stores, and “it’s still very early days,” Motukuri said.
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Technical production for the Stadium Tech Report podcast is led by Creative Director Dan Grimsley, and Digital Designer Jackie Nguyen. Web and design work is by David Fares and John David. All contents of the Stadium Tech Report podcast are copyright, Stadium Tech Report. Audio, video and print content may not be re-used without the express written consent of Stadium Tech Report.
