Airport Experience® News - Food & Beverage Issue 2024

Transforming Aviation

Innovation Labs Bring Different Approaches, Significant Advances To Airports

“The response was pretty much ‘anything that will get people off my floors plugged into the walls, and keep them moving through the airport, I’m all for it,’” Yeagley says. The two started working on a prototype vending machine and, a couple months after the initial meeting, began testing it in a former commuter terminal that had been recommissioned as a lab where companies could test their real-world products in a real-world terminal. Staff “took over that space and started creating a virtual world to trial various innovations that could be brought into airports,” says Yeagley, adding that the company set up a machine, passed out FuelRods and asked people for their feedback “and got an understanding of whether or not they believed this was a good thing to put in the airport,” he says. “We got fantastic feedback.” The rest is history. The innovation lab at SAN has since closed, but FuelRod was its first success. Many airports have followed suit, finding space within or near the airport where they can, along with partners, test products that might eventually be used internally or marketed to the greater airport community as a whole.

The need for charging in an airport is a constant, and FuelRod vending machines, offering purchase or exchange of mobile charging units for various devices, are a welcome sight for many. The company has close to 600 kiosks spread across major airports and amusement parks across the U.S. The company is big enough now where it might be easy to forget that FuelRod’s origins were significantly assisted by an innovation lab at San Diego International Airport (SAN) . Co-Founders Joe Yeagley and Chi Yau were already talking with the concessions team at SAN when they were introduced to staff from a new department tasked with finding new concepts relevant to the airport and the industry. They hadn’t yet come up with the kiosk but had mockups and an idea that would provide passengers with a more sustainable way to charge their phones and other devices.

BY ANDREW TELLIJOHN

44

AX NEWS JUNE 2024