For sushi restaurants, monitoring the quality of its products, including raw seafood, is critically important. Blue C Sushi implemented RFID (radio frequency identification) from Intermec and business process technology from Microsoft to track its food and automatically calculate customers' bills. The system of Intermec RFID readers and antennas, Microsoft BizTalk RFID, and integrator Kikata's Ebisu Live Inventory Management software tracks food as it moves from the kitchen to customers.

Blue C Sushi restaurants are based on the concept of kaiten sushi where customers select plates of sushi from a rotating conveyor belt that winds through the restaurant moving past every table. Customers pay based on the number and types of plates they choose. At Blue C Sushi, plate colors indicate prices for specific items.

RFID technology replaced the original tracking system, which used bar codes on the bottom of the plates. That system could only track the time a plate was put on the conveyor belt and that a customer had pulled it off. The new RFID system provides much more detailed business intelligence, like what item is on the plate, how long it has been on the conveyor, which chef produced it and which menu items are running short.

"This technology improves our understanding of what customers want, and what items are popular at particular times or on specific days of the week," said James Allard, Cofounder of Blue C Sushi. "It has greatly improved how we plan for and order food and help us to centralize the ordering of food from one location, while helping us reduce waste. This technology is going to help us continue bringing customers in and enable our business to grow more quickly."