eInfochips, a San Jose, Calif.-based Arrow Electronics company, joined forces with Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., to enable smart solutions for connected appliances in the food and beverage industry.

The team is currently working with f’real foods, an Emeryville, Calif.-based provider of milkshakes and smoothies in frozen pre-packaged cups, to enable a next-generation connected Internet of Things (IoT) solution for f’real blenders, located in over 20,000 retail stores globally.

The solution for f’real involves the development of a blender OS and IoT management platform, cloud data storage and management and a retailer portal solution. The IoT solution will enable f’real to have real-time access to data, including blender screen content, devices, diagnostics and predictive analytics, among others.

“As the No. 1 frozen novelty brand in convenience stores, f'real continues to innovate in the category, offering great quality products and experiences to our customers,” says Allison Lewin, senior vice president of marketing and sales for f’real. “We engaged with eInfochips and Microsoft to build an integrated management platform that will improve our blender reliability and connectivity, and allow us to quickly scale domestically and internationally, by enabling complete visibility to the data and allowing real-time control of our blenders.”

“Our digital engineering team, comprised of highly skilled IoT, cloud and DevOps engineers, are working in tandem with Microsoft and f’real teams to develop a smart IoT connected blender platform,” says Parag Mehta, chief business development officer at eInfochips. “We have also enabled over-the-air update for migration to the new platform, which will help save millions of dollars for f’real on technical support visits.”

“It is a privilege to work with eInfochips, who is leveraging our technology to enable customers’ digital transformation at scale,” says Nicole Denil, general manager, IoT channel sales at Microsoft. “eInfochips and Microsoft are teaming to provide a variety of Azure-powered, edge-to-cloud solutions that empower customers like f’real to seamlessly build, deploy and scale connected appliances.”