AB InBev has launched hoppy, a beer education app aiming to give its own employees and consumers a better understanding of beer. In order to make the education more enjoyable, the users have at the end of each lesson to take a quiz to earn a badge for that lesson and collect ‘beercoins’ to compete on a leader board.
Originally hoppy was designed as an internal corporate training app for AB InBev to help employees across all areas of the company learn more about beer, the history, culture, ingredients and process of making and enjoying great beer.
“We had a lot of training available but it was perhaps too academic or in-depth or maybe too much a brewmaster-kind of teaching. We ended up crushing it into a smaller, playful format, using gamification to make it interesting,” said Charles Nouwen, proud owner of a fabulous job title: head of passion for beer at AB Inbev. “So we created this application. It’s still internal. However, we realized that everything within the app is so genuine and consumer-facing so we are in the process of making it available to everybody,” Nouwen explained in a podcast early in April.
The app was now made publicly available for use on a desktop computer as well as on smartphones for both iOS and Android platforms. Content is stored locally on the device and only re-loaded when a version change is detected. This helps the app to function offline if necessary, as well as speeding up loading and limiting redundant loading. While the pilot program only required English and Spanish languages, the app is architected to handle any language loaded into it based on the user’s selected locale.
