Empowering ice cream vendors
through effortless tech
In the bustling streets of Lima, where the sun beats hard, thousands of ice-cream vendors toil tirelessly day in and day out.
D'Onofrio ice cream is part of the city's folklore — everyone eats it. But these vendors face a tough reality: their customers can sometimes struggle to find them. And since they're self-employed, this adds to an already challenging economic situation.
Walking for hours under the scorching sun and the chaos of the city, they're just trying to make ends meet.
Our goal was clear:
to empower street vendors with tech that let them be found.
And let customers find them on a map.
We talked to them to understand their day-to-day, how they work, and their conditions.
They've been a recognized presence in their neighborhood for years.
They're self-employed. They work long hours and earn little.
They sell the same way they have for generations, with little interest in changing that.
When we floated the idea, we explored how they'd react to a change.
The less their routine changes, the better — if it already works.
At first, they don't see much value in the initiative.
They have limited experience using technology or apps.
In a first attempt, we asked vendors to carry mobile phones with an app we built to track their location.
But after the pilot, we found out this asked too much of them — they'd forget to turn the app on, and used the phone to download games instead.
We attached a small Sigfox locator to each cart. It's a low-power, low-cost technology that regularly sends location coordinates to our system.
This way, customers could find their favorite vendor through a simple app, while vendors benefited from a solution that fit seamlessly into their daily routine — they didn't have to do a single thing.
Walking the streets of Lima, I gathered insights into local challenges while coordinating with the team in San Francisco and doing on-site research. Together, we ensured the smooth implementation and monitoring of the localization technology, supported by Pilot44's technical experiments.
We built an app with a simple map and a discount system. Now, whenever they craved ice cream, they could track vendors' location in real time.
But that's not all — we knew that technology alone wasn't enough. We needed to raise awareness and drive engagement, so we launched a comprehensive campaign, spreading the word far and wide.
As we wrapped up the pilot, we couldn't help but smile at the bumps we hit trying to fit new technology into the vendors' lives.
The lesson: changing routines that are years in the making is hard. The less effort it takes, the more effective it is.
In the end, customers were thrilled to easily find their favorite vendors, and the vendors were happy too, thanks to a fully passive technology that let them be found without changing a single thing about their routine.
