The Brief
In June 2026, Hickory’s Smokehouse brought its teams together for two festival-style team days, with around 1,200 guests at each. Gathering that many guests at an outdoor site brings a familiar challenge: keeping things relaxed rather than rushed, with quick entry, easy food and drink, and no cash changing hands in a field. Hickory’s wanted its teams to simply enjoy themselves, while organisers kept a clear, real-time picture of who had arrived and how the event was running. Delekit delivered the technology behind both events, end to end.
What we delivered
Every guest started with a branded, mobile-first registration journey that captured consent and date of birth, then received a QR e-ticket by email. On arrival, the client team scanned that e-ticket and issued each guest an RFID wristband pre-loaded with their food and drink tokens — so from the moment they were through the gate, a single tap covered everything for the rest of the day. Because each wristband was tied to the date of birth given at registration, the cashless bar automatically restricted alcohol for anyone under 18, removing the need for the team to make that judgement call in a busy queue and giving Hickory’s confidence that age rules were enforced consistently across the site.
Cashless redemption ran throughout, with live inventory tracking behind every counter, which kept queues moving and took cash handling out of the equation entirely. Organisers retained full control during the day: as they reviewed consumption in real time across all seven food and drink bars, they could remotely add tokens to VIP wristbands on the fly. The client could also pull reports live, seeing exactly how many guests were inside the festival at any moment. After each event, post-event reports covering arrivals, attendance and spend turned two busy days in the field into clear, usable data the team could look back on.
Running two events in open fields meant connectivity could never be a single point of failure, so the setup was built in layers. Each venue had dedicated WiFi as the primary connection, every scanning and redemption device also carried its own SIM to fall back to mobile data if the WiFi dropped, and on top of that the platform ran a full offline mode — so token redemption and check-in scanning kept working even with no signal at all, syncing automatically once a connection returned. Whatever the field threw at it, all bases were covered and the guest experience never paused.
