What we learnt from three days at Food & Hospitality Week Sydney

Two café owners stopped at our stand, watched a single scan light up every food label at once, and one of them said it out loud: “Get out, this is incredible!” Loud enough that the next stand looked over. We wish we’d filmed it.

That was our favourite moment.

From 25–27 May, the three of us — Albert Jindra (our founder), Eva Krejcirikova and Ivana Galic from marketing and sales — spent three days at RESTECH, part of Food & Hospitality Week at ICC Sydney. We went to find out what’s actually stressing hospo operators in 2026. We had well over 200 conversations, and forgot to eat more than once. (We made up for it at dinner.)

Here’s what we heard.

”We’re still writing it on paper”

The conversation we had again and again went like this: temperatures get written on a paper log by hand, then keyed into a spreadsheet later, someday, hopefully.

So much manual effort, and no way of knowing when the fridge breaks down until it’s too late. You’re risking losing thousands of dollars’ worth of food.

Every time we showed how °Celsi removes the manual step and sensors logging temperatures automatically, every minute, we saw the same look. The look of someone realising a job they’ve always hated just disappeared.

The masking-tape moment

The biggest reactions came from something we didn’t quite expect: food labels.

Scan all the QR codes on your containers at once, and you instantly see what’s expired and what’s still good to use. No squinting at handwritten dates.

“That’s neat! Wow.”

“So I don’t have to use masking tape anymore?”

It’s a job not many people talk about, until someone shows you it doesn’t have to be that way.

Meet AIKA, our AI kitchen assistant

The other crowd-stopper was a wall of colourful little knobs. People kept slowing down and asking: “What’s that?”

So we let them explore it.

AIKA is our new AI kitchen assistant — still in beta, but it turned a lot of heads. Tap it to check a fridge temp. It alerts you the moment something’s out of range. Connect it to a Thermapen and it logs the temperature of cooked chicken in the bain-marie automatically. It sends food labels to print. It even flags when you need to replace the shredded cheese or guacamole next (every 4 hours, as per regulations).

No phone, no work tablet, no clipboard. Tap, click, done. The knob stays on the wall, clips to your shirt, or comes with you while you’re measuring hot and cold food.

Our kind of people

The buzz at the event was electric. The kind that carries you through three days on your feet.

The best part was being surrounded by people who love solving problems for hospo operators as much as we do. We caught up with Ken Brand from Restoke.ai and consulting chef Paul Rifkin, and traded plenty of ideas with the operators, suppliers and fellow exhibitors who stopped by.

One conversation has us especially excited. We met a logistics company that supplies two of our biggest customers, Yo-Chi and Guzman y Gomez. It’s got us exploring something new: putting °Celsi sensors inside shipping containers, so temperature, food quality and compliance could be tracked across the whole supply chain — not just once stock lands in the kitchen.

What we took home

A big thank you to everyone who stopped by Stand B27. Your questions, your stories, and your enthusiasm are exactly why we keep building.

See you next time.