Grand Cinemas Food and Beverage ordering
Grand Cinemas have always been innovators in the cinema industry and their latest mobile app update developed by Adapptor continues this trend. Seeing a return in customers and major film releases post-pandemic, the timing was perfect for the release of their new, in-app food and beverage ordering service, bringing greater power and convenience to their app users.
“This is an exciting new edition to our app that has been in development for several years...our customers will be able to purchase their tickets and food via the app before they arrive, and also order food and drinks while watching their movie without leaving their chair.”
The new features enhances the app experience with the ability to order food and drink when purchasing gold lounge tickets ahead of time, as well as the option to add food or drink at a later point or directly from a user’s seat during a film within the app. This boosts the cinema experience by reducing interruptions and streamlining the food ordering process. With the option to choose when you would like your food—at the start of the film, during the first half, or later—it’s easy to customise to your preferences. This means less time waiting in queue or speaking to staff, and more time watching.
The Solution
Having previously developed the app to do a daily data refresh from Grand Cinema’s Venue servers, we enhanced this capability to update the in-app list of available food and drink items and prices allowing for easy revision of menus. This means Grand Cinemas is able to make changes in their Venue system and have the items reflected correctly in the app. All updates automatically filter into the new app screens the user can see when attempting to book a gold lounge purchase, or from the food screen on their purchased ticket.
Along with this, new web APIs written in Go by Adapptor in orchestration with work at Venue, allow food and drink to be ordered separate to the purchase of tickets. These APIs ensure that a user can order when they feel like it, rather than needing to pre-book items exclusively.
Google Firebase was leveraged to store user orders, with each order being assigned an absolute time in a format understandable to all of the involved systems. This allows the kitchen to action orders based on the times they were placed, and to ensure users receive their food and drink in a timely manner.
Go Live Strategy
Ensuring this service would cope with high demand reliably was critical to delivery. Adapptor’s QA team worked alongside Grand Cinemas to build confidence that the solution was ready for prime time. From the outset we established that the service would need extensive testing in both the staging and production environments to ensure the final product would be fit for business use. This posed the challenge of transacting orders in production rather than only mocking them in the staging environment.
Adapptor visited Grand Cinemas Warwick to conduct production testing against the service on multiple occasions, allowing real transactions to be tested mirroring real user experience. This on-premise production testing gave us insight into the end-to-end process, and the ability to confirm that all aspects of the service were functioning as expected.
The value of in-person testing was quickly proved. While on site it was possible to see orders made through the app display in the kitchen in real time, and this revealed where orders were overwriting each other and not displaying in Grand Cinemas internal point of sale system. Problems pinpointed by testing were addressed early, resulting in a successful launch of the new features.
Bon appétit!