Kioti. UpNorth Group · equipment monitoring, alerts and reporting for dark kitchens, live
When the network drops mid-service, UpNorth’s kitchen crews keep working on the tablet in front of them and nothing they logged during the outage is lost. Their operations team sees every kitchen’s equipment on one screen, and each alert goes to whoever has to act on it.
1,000+ readings an hour 99.9% uptime iOS · Android · web
Where UpNorth were.
UpNorth Group runs dark kitchens: delivery-only sites where fridges, ovens, prep stations and holding cabinets are all instrumented and all critical to getting food out on time. The tooling they had handled steady-state service well enough. It broke exactly when it mattered, when the network dropped mid-service, when kitchen tablets disagreed with each other, and when operations needed to see patterns across sites rather than one kitchen at a time.
They brought OpenKit in to build one system across iOS, Android and web for equipment monitoring, alerts and reporting, designed from the start around what happens when the network fails mid-service. UpNorth came back the year after launch to extend it across the estate, with area-manager views and utilities reporting.
- 01
iOS, Android and web apps plus an IoT ingestion pipeline, now handling 1,000+ equipment readings an hour in live service.
- 02
Kitchen tablets that keep working through a dropped connection and reconcile state on reconnect, so a crew never loses progress mid-service.
- 03
Running live across UpNorth's kitchens at 99.9% uptime, extended the year after launch with area-manager views across the estate.
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. So the system had to assume the connection will fail and stay honest about what it knows when it does.
- 01
Equipment monitoring that stays truthful through an outage, on the tablet in front of the crew.
- 02
Alerts that reach the right person at the right severity, before equipment drift becomes an incident.
- 03
Reporting that lets one operations team run multiple kitchens, with an audit trail the safety team can stand behind.
Inside Kioti.
Kioti runs as a single platform across iOS, Android and web, with shared state across all three surfaces and role-based views for kitchen managers, engineers, panel operatives and area managers. The IoT pipeline takes 1,000+ readings an hour at 99.9% uptime in live service, and the alert engine routes equipment events to the right person before they become incidents. 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. The ingestion pipeline behind it is sized for 1,000+ readings an hour across the estate.
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, and the HACCP-aligned audit trail underneath gives the safety team what it needs for regulator-facing conversations.
What changed for UpNorth.
equipment readings an hour, watched live across every site.
uptime across UpNorth’s kitchens in live service.
workflows lost to a network drop: tablets hold local state and reconcile when the connection returns.
surfaces carrying one state, so the team works from whatever suits the role, kitchen floor to estate view.
The build
- IoT ingestion (1,000+ events/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
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.
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