Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Co. (Coca-Cola HBC), one of The Coca-Cola Co.‘s largest bottlers, has launched a wireless system to collect data from hundreds of thousands of in-store coolers. The Internet of Things (IoT) system, provided by digital transformation technology company Atos, captures the stock level at each store, along with customer activities and cooler temperatures. The solution also enables engagement with customers who buy Coca-Cola products.

Atos’s Codex technology leverages Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology as part of the solution, which Coca-Cola HBC calls connected coolers. The new system was announced in July 2018, and the companies are now working together to connect the coolers across the 28 countries in which Coca-Cola’s products are sold. Worldwide, the bottling company has a fleet of 1.6 million coolers in operation, 300,000 of which are expected to be connected to the system by the end of this year. In the long term, Atos predicts, the technology will connect Coca-Cola HBC’s entire fleet of coolers.

Coca-Cola HBC is one of the world’s largest bottlers, with operations throughout Russia and other European countries, as well as in Nigeria. The company reports that it serves approximately 595 million consumers. Atos has already been working with Coca-Cola HBC for more than 15 years as a provider of IT solutions, says Joshua Fiorenza, Atos’s VP and head of North America Operations for IoT.

For the connected cooler solution, the challenge was to attain real-time visibility into Coca-Cola HBC’s in-store cooler placement and product availability, as well as customers’ buying behaviors and the temperature inside each cooler—all without requiring a sales representative to be onsite. The solution began with a proof-of-value pilot. Atos provided the initial pilot with a simple installation designed to scale, Fiorenza recalls. “A large IT service provider such as Atos can deliver customers an E2E [end-to-end] IoT capability,” he says, that includes design, building, installation and support across many business platforms.