Harry Denton's moves to beverage control techHarry Denton's moves to beverage control tech

SAN FRANCISCO Harry Denton's Starlight Room in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel here reported that liquor costs dropped almost three percentage points within a month of installing a control system using radio frequency identification chip technology to wirelessly track and report pouring and payment activities.

"That represents thousands of dollars in savings in one month. The system pays for itself almost immediately," Drake restaurants general manager Robert Robinson said of using Capton Inc.'s Beverage Tracker system with RFID-chip-enhanced pour spouts and software. "We are extremely pleased with the ability to do spot checks [and] reconcile Aloha point-of-sale system data with actual pouring data," he continued, and added,  "The inventory cost reductions, as measured by pour average reductions, combined with behavioral adjustments, have made us true believers."

Sausalito, Calif.-based Capton provided Harry Denton's Starlight Room, a Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants property, with bartender training and certification at the outset of the technology deployment. Starlight Room outlets manager Michael Pagan said "contests were run to encourage perfect pouring and a bartender scorecard tool implemented which allowed all staff to be rated both as individuals and as teams when they worked together; pouring patterns in almost every case have dramatically improved."