Equipment monitoring for dark kitchens.

Challenge

What UpNorth needed

Kitchen IoT is easy in steady state. The hard part is dinner service. When the network drops, most tools either freeze or quietly present stale data as if it were live, and a kitchen acting on stale temperatures is a food-safety question waiting to be asked. The system had to assume the connection will fail and stay honest about what it knows when it does.

• Equipment monitoring that stays truthful through an outage, on the tablet in front of the crew.
• Alerts that reach the right person at the right severity, before equipment drift becomes an incident.
• Reporting that lets one operations team run multiple kitchens, with an audit trail the safety team can stand behind.

Approach

Inside Kioti

Kioti runs as a single platform across iOS, Android and web, with shared state across all three apps and role-based views for kitchen managers, engineers, panel operatives and area managers. The IoT pipeline takes 1,000+ readings an hour in live service. The hard part was the tablet, and that is where the build started.

Tablets that survive a dropped connection

Prep checklists, equipment checks and service workflows run on the kitchen tablet and keep running when the network goes. The tablet holds local state through the outage and reconciles on reconnect, so a crew never repeats work or loses progress because the Wi-Fi blinked mid-service.

Every piece of equipment, reporting live

Every fridge, oven and prep station reports into one equipment view, alongside gas, electricity and water monitoring, with trends per unit so an operator catches drift before it becomes a fault.

Alerts routed by severity, tracked to resolution

Equipment drift, temperature excursions and safety triggers route to the right person at the right severity. Each alert is tracked from acknowledgement to resolution.

Reports and a HACCP-aligned audit trail

Daily and weekly breakdowns give the operations team the patterns across kitchens. Monthly equipment fault reports track faults and callouts per site. Underneath sits a HACCP-aligned audit trail the safety team can take into a regulator-facing conversation.

Result

What changed for UpNorth

Kioti runs live across UpNorth’s kitchens at 99.9% uptime. The team works from whatever suits the role, from a tablet on the kitchen floor to the console that covers them all.

UpNorth came back the year after launch to extend it across every site, with area-manager views and utilities reporting.

Stack

The build and the controls

The build

• IoT ingestion, 1,000+ readings an hour
• iOS + Android native apps
• Web operations console
• Tablet workflows with offline tolerance
• Equipment + alerts + reports

Controls on this project

• UK GDPR
• UK data residency
• Hospitality safety reporting alignment

Voice

What UpNorth said

Working with OpenKit proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable and collaborative experience; they were quick to adapt to industry specific challenges and applied their expertise in software development to deliver an enterprise grade full stack IOT solution. I was impressed with how creatively they were able to produce solutions when faced with complex and unexpected scenarios.