Shinkansen food train delivers orders directly to diners

Hong Chiang Technology Industry Co. (Hong Chiang) specializes in automated restaurant equipment development and manufacturing for the food and beverage industry. Its main products include food delivery carts, rotating sushi systems, hot pots and other types of food service bar counters, as well as commercial display counters. Depending on the customer’s site specifications or requirements, the company develops customized subsystems for auto-mated food delivery using electromagnetic suspension tracks.

To enhance its market competitiveness, Hong Chiang developed the Shinkansen line of food delivery systems, named for Japan’s shinkansen bullet trains. These innovative trains bring express delivery to the table, and can deliver sushi orders (or any other dish) directly to customers on conveyors and automatically return to the kitchen. The trains incorporate Bluetooth and infrared technologies as well as wire-less charging. The precise delivery is fast, and offers restaurant owners the benefits of higher table turnover and lower wait staff costs, and they eliminate the accidents and mistakes of manual delivery. Shinkansen food delivery systems include an upper rail, drive mechanism, drive motor, lower belt conveyor, pallet and a visually appealing model vehicle that “pulls” the train.

Hong Chiang uses Solid Edge® software from Siemens Digital Industries Software to design its products more efficiently. “Industry 4.0 requires automated production,” says Donny Lo, general manager, Hong Chiang. “Dining and beverage equipment development will also follow this step by making improvements. Our previous design soft-ware could not meet the requirements for developing more complex designs. But after evaluation, we decided to adopt Solid Edge.

Donny said a major reason Hong Chiang selected Solid Edge over competing computer-aided design (CAD) software was because of its synchronous modeling capability. “Compared with other types of advanced CAD software, with Solid Edge our designers can stretch structures in the assembly, so it is very convenient,” says Donny. “The price point is favorable and all the capabilities we need are included in this solution, so we do not need to purchase other software solutions.”