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Hiroia, a joint venture company established by the century-old coffee product company Hario, specializes in making the craziest coffee equipment. This time Hiroia wants to try a crazier idea, they teamed up with iPhone maker Wistron to build the IoT ecosystem in the coffee world.
AAron Fujiki, the founder of Hiroia, spent his early professional career as a merger and acquisition(M&A) specialist in Wall Street. He cultivated his vision to always foresee an industry in the next 10 years M&A case after M&A case. When he came back to Taiwan in 2008, he got invited to join a plastic company as a consultant. The company's main product is USB plastic, which is apparently a sunset industry, but Fujiki predicted the iPhone would dominate the world at that time, and helped the factory transform into high-margin products: manufacturing smartphone accessories. As a result, the factory revived.
A few years later, known by Fujiki's magic of transforming dying companies, a scale making factory asked his help for transformation. Noticing the exponential growth of coffee consumption, Fujiki guided the factory to build several exquisite scales for the coffee players and made a huge success.
According to the data from the international coffee organization, Taiwanese people consume 2.8 billion cups of coffee a year, and the coffee market size is over 70 billion NTD. In addition, the Taiwanese won the championship from four main coffee competitions: World Barista Championship(WBC), World Cup Tasters Championship(WCTC), World Coffee Roasting Championship(WCRC), and World Brewers Cup(WBrC). So many pieces of evidence show that Taiwan is one of the best places for developing coffee-related businesses, and the century-old Japanese coffee product company Hario also foresees Taiwan's potential.
In 2017, Hario teamed up with Fujiki to form a joint venture: Hiroia. With Hario's international marketing resources, Fujiki wants to bring some innovative ideas to the coffee market that are beyond anyone's imagination - he wants to implement internet technology to the coffee ecosystem.
The first step was to launch an online marketplace for coffee shops. It is like a coffee map where people can check for nearby coffee shops and which beans the coffee shop provides. Furthermore, consumers can order freshly roasted coffee beans directly from the coffee shop through the app.
For the next step, Fujiki wants to build a series of IoT coffee products, but building IoT products need lots of expertise. Although Hiroia knows how to design coffee equipment, designing IoT devices will be another story. As a result, Fujiki decided to cooperate with Wistron, which is known as an iPhone maker and specializes in making IoT devices.
Wistron has been seeking deeper cooperation with companies that have brilliant ideas related to IoT products. They formed the New Business Development Innovation Integration Center(IIC) to provide a full range of commercialized services including product development, integration of IoT sensing applications, and product manufacturing.
With Wistron's technology power, Hiroia rolled out a breakthrough product: Ziggy, which is a coffee brewer that can dramatically reduce the time to make cold brew coffee from 24 hours to 5 minutes, and most importantly, Ziggy is connected with WiFi, which means people can update the recipe or tune the parameters through the app.
"We want to reduce the barrier for drinking the good coffee by bringing the IoT technology. People have been consumed more and more coffees, but there are not enough barista talents. With Ziggy, the whole story is changed, every employee can serve great coffee effortlessly now," Fujiki said.
Attracted by the auto-updating recipe concept, a leading hand beverage shop has bought hundreds of Ziggy for their overseas markets. "The hand beverage shop tells me that they have expanded the shops to some rural area, and it is hard to recruit barista there, but with Ziggy, they no longer need to worry about this problem," said Fujiki. "Switching the menu becomes a piece of cake too, once the shop launch new kinds of coffee, they can update the parameter for the new coffee to hundreds of Ziggy just through few clicks on the app."
We can say that Wistron's technical support is the key factor to the success of Ziggy, but why Wistron willing to spend millions of dollars on research and prototyping expenditure for the IoT coffee machine? "Wistron believe IoT is the next big thing. Instead of talking Wistron is good at building IoT appliances, we want to show it through the real product, and Ziggy is one of great example to show Wistron's muscle in IoT," said Elton Fang, who is the chief of innovation integration center of Wistron.
With the success of Ziggy, Fujiki will continue his ambiguous plan to build the coffee IoT ecosystem with Wistron. "Taiwan have high quality coffee specialists, plus Taiwan have strong manufacturing power. I can not find a better place to developing my products," said Fujiki.
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