Heineken Draught Competition
The scoring app behind Heineken's global Star Quality program. It turns a 40-point pour assessment into a competition that's fast to judge and fun to play.
Heineken's Star Quality program trains bartenders around the world to pour the perfect beer. It's a precise five-step ritual, judged on more than forty separate details, and getting it right is the difference between a good serve and a Heineken serve.
But the judging ran on pen and paper. Scoring was slow, felt a little arbitrary, and vanished the moment a session ended. Heineken could never see where trainings happened, how bartenders performed, or where the biggest gains were hiding.
It started with a design sprint
We opened with a design sprint to get options on the table quickly. One concept stood out. Instead of picking who did each step best, score every pour against a detailed checklist: forty separate criteria, grouped into the five steps of the ritual, so points are earned rather than guessed.
The open question was whether one person could keep up. Could a trainer watch the pour closely and still enter dozens of judgements in real time? We built a prototype and tested it at Heineken's own bar space in Amsterdam, with real trainers and bartenders.
It paid off straight away. The tap targets needed to be bigger. Trainers needed a way to correct a score after the fact. And counterintuitively, pre-ticking every criterion to save time actually slowed people down. The thing that mattered held up: a five-step input list lets a trainer keep exact pace with the person pouring.
A 40-point call, made at the speed of a pour
After validating the concept, we could dive into designing the iOS and Android apps, hand in hand with the second screen that brings the room into it. The flow had to feel intuitive and fast, so we found clever ways to make pairing effortless and adding participants to a training quick. Before a single beer is poured, the trainer picks the brand, from Heineken to the rest of the portfolio, and the language, and the second screen adapts to match.
We also wanted to build excitement in the room. So the app decides who goes first, the second screen announces them, and the ritual begins. From there the trainer keeps a close eye on the pour, marking off the criteria step by step with quick taps as the bartender works. A real pour takes seconds, so the interface is built to keep pace, and every score stays editable right after.
Then the points land, the leaderboard updates, and the room leans in. Everyone wants to overtake the bartender above them. When the last person has poured, the final leaderboard reveals the top three.
Every pour becomes training data
A training could go brilliantly and leave the whole room buzzing, and still leave nothing behind to learn from. Once the session ended, so did the insight. Heineken had no hard numbers to steer on, and no clear way to see where a program could get better.
With the introduction of a custom dashboard, nothing is lost. Every competition flows in, where the team can review results across sessions, spot patterns, and share them back with the venues and clients they train.
Filters make it quick to pull up trainings by brand or by trainer, so it's easy to see where bartenders excel and where a program needs sharpening. Setting up a session is just as fast. Trainings are linked to the right client in a back-office built to find existing customers or add new ones on the spot.
“The app plays a key role in our trainings, and participants really enjoy the competitive element at the end, which boosts engagement. Since working together, the value of our training sessions has clearly increased.”
From the training floor to the Champions League: draught judging that's finally fast, fair, and worth the data.
By moving scoring off paper and into a real-time app, we turned Heineken's draught trainings from an arbitrary check into a competition. A forty-point assessment now happens at the speed of a pour, and every result is captured, giving the Star Quality team the training data they never had.
The format travels, too. What sharpens bartenders in a training room also entertains crowds at Formula 1 and the Champions League. Same app, same perfect-pour standard, on the world's biggest stages.
Since launch, Heineken has run twice as many Star Quality trainings, by their own count. A scoring routine became a competition worth repeating.
Beyond the training floor, the app runs at major international events, from Formula 1 to the Champions League.