SERVING FOR THE WIN
AT THE AUSTRALIAN OPEN SERIES
Feb 19, 2025
Featuring
Tennis Australia, Australian Open Series & The United Cup
Tennis Australia is the governing body for tennis in Australia. The association organizes national and international tennis tournaments including the Australian Open, Australian Open Series, Davis Cup, Billie Jean King Cup, ATP Cup, and Australian Pro Tour.
Founded in 2022, the United Cup is an official, mixed team tournament in Australia spread across 10 days attracting over 70,000 fans!
Objective
Tennis Australia (TA) partnered with Foodini for the 2024/25 United Cup to create a more inclusive and improved hospitality experience for guests with dietary needs. The aim was two-fold:
- Provide top patrons of the event with the ability to easily access comprehensive menus across all food options that easily and clearly highlight the available food options that match a guest's dietary needs.
- Speed up the management review of the hospitality business selected by eliminating dietary queries, so the event staff is often not able to answer, ultimately removing the barriers that with dietary needs to enjoy the catering options with ease and confidence.
18 food vendors
The providers work with varied levels of menu information and ingredient level data. Foodini was able to streamline this information and present it in an easy to use format.
350+ ingredients
Across 6 different cuisines, menus were broken down to the ingredient level. This was checked and verified against more than 150 dietary needs by Foodini's dietitians with the chefs of each vendor.
2,147 happy diners
More the 2k visitors used Foodini inaugural solution to make quick and confident food choices based on their dietary needs; confirming the consumer demand for better food transparency.
Guest Experience: Enjoying choice
Using Foodini's solution, guests with dietary needs were able to attend the event with the highest expectation in their lives will only be a very limited number of suitable menu options. While this can be true for individual menus that are not balanced, our aim for this tournament was to showcase the total number of options across the United Cup's global catering range.
By creating an experience that instantly showed guests what they can eat and where to go to get it, we allowed them to focus on the games and enjoy their time!
"The response was overwhelmingly positive and one guest commented: "I've been coming here before and I never knew how many options are actually o.k. for me to eat! This is so cool!"
Vendor experience: Referring to the experts
Vendors at the United Cup are experts in their field of catering and hospitality, but it's incredibly hard for hospitality providers to communicate the food options in ways that make it clear and easy for diners with dietary needs to make a selection.Especially in event catering where the variety of menu options is necessary, and when items like received dedicated allergy & dietary training.
While certain dietary tags such as GF, V or VG have become more prevalent in recent years, accurately maintaining them through recipe or supplier changes and in light of the growing prevalence and complexity of today's dietary needs range is a struggle.
This is where Foodini's DietaryAI steps in to create comprehensive ingredient transparency and provide the hospitality team with a single source of truth for quality assurance and interact directly with the vendors where clarification is needed.
"As a result one of the vendors of the event stated:"This makes my life so much easier! I simply refer any guest asking about diets and allergies to the Foodini QR code and let them know dietitians have reviewed our food for them."
"The food offerings are a crucial pillar at all our major events and Foodini’s technology makes it easier for our fans to make informed dietary choices. The pilot at United Cup was a fantastic initiative that was well received by both fans and food vendors."
Machar Reid
Director of Innovation, Tennis Australia
Takeaways & Future Outlook
Implementing Foodini's event solution had a huge impact in creating a more inclusive environment, helping families get the info they need ahead of time, more efficient operations and significantly improved guest satisfaction in the staff.
The transparency and ability to individually customize the solution to their personal dietary needs gives guests the confidence to swap home prepared food in favour of enjoying the event catering with confidence. The solution can also be deployed across separate environments for the event staff or players.
In addition, Foodini's Next Generation data analytics (launching 2025) will provide detailed insights into the dietary cohorts of the audience, which allows to adapt the overall catering offering and make recommendations on event-specific menu compositions for the future.
We are looking forward to building on this amazing guest experience at Tennis Australia events.