KFC is said to be the second food company from the West that sought to open a franchise outlet in China, many years ago back in 1987. They followed McDonald's, after the folks at McDonald's opened up their first shop in China back in 1984. Since then, KFC has gone on to open up thousands of other locations; more than 5,000 different locations over the years.
They've also established KPro, which happens to be a “healthier alternative” to their traditional KFC options.
It tries to market a much healthier image and offers more salads, things like freshly made juice and paninis, it also has different branding from the traditional KFC image that we are familiar with (see image below).
At one of their KFC KPro locations, they are now accepting facial recognition scanning as a method of payment.
For those who visit this venue location and who don't want to bother to take out their wallet and pay with cash or open up their phone to pay with some mobile payment method, they can now scan their face at a kiosk. After they scan their face, they enter their phone number and the order will be placed.
The payment system that they've set up is said to be centered around the Alipay digital payment platform and the payment app also allows users to sign into the app using a scan of their face.
At this time, this KPro location is said to be the first location in the world that is a physical restaurant store location that is accepting facial recognition scanning as a form of payment. Eventually, they expect that this system will be rolled out to even more locations and consumers will start to see it at not only restaurants like KPro, but at places like retail outlets and more.
The new payment service is offered via Ant Financial and they've already indicated that they soon plan to extend the technology to a variety of other venue locations.
Facial recognition scanning is moving forward around the country in other ways as well, from being used to scan for toilet paper access, to scanning passengers at train stations, airports, and more.
Political officials there have already signaled their interest to move forward aggressively with their AI technology plans. And they have previously said that they plan for AI technology to play a very important part of their economy by the year 2020.
Pics:
Pixabay
thatsmags via thatsmags.com/china/post/19687/kfc-goes-green
icons8 via icons8.com/icon/7339/facial-recognition-scan
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food_in_China
http://brandchannel.com/2017/07/14/kfc-k-pro-china-071417/
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/01/technology/china-alipay-kfc-facial-recognition/index.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4843600/Just-smile-In-KFC-China-store-diners-new-way-pay.html
https://qz.com/1067460/in-china-facial-recognition-is-used-to-buy-kfc-board-planes-and-catch-drug-users/