When we started developing IQ Tap, the brief was not about winning awards. It was about solving a specific set of problems that come with running beverage service in a luxury hotel environment — reliability under pressure, ease of use for short-staffed teams, and a design that actually belongs in a five-star space.
The 2026 Red Dot Award for Product Design, granted by an independent international jury of 40 experts across 61 countries, recognised the outcome of that process. For us, the significance of the award lies in who is doing the judging — not a marketing panel, but a rigorous design quality assessment carried out by professionals with no stake in the result.
Why design matters in hospitality equipment
Equipment in hotel F&B operations is often evaluated purely on technical specifications and price. Design is treated as secondary — something that matters aesthetically but not operationally.
In practice, the two are difficult to separate. A system that is difficult to clean adds time to an already pressured morning routine. A machine that requires staff training creates dependency on people who may not be there tomorrow. An interface that is not intuitive increases the chance of errors during a 300-cover breakfast service.
Good design removes these friction points. It does not draw attention to itself — it just makes the operation work more smoothly.
How IQ Tap was developed
The foundation for IQ Tap was a Life Cycle Assessment of our previous dispensing solution. That process identified specific areas for improvement: material use, energy consumption, maintenance complexity, and operational reliability.
Those findings became the development brief. Working together with Wilsonic Design, every element of IQ Tap — from the compact footprint to the removable drip tray to the automated cleaning function — was shaped by operational requirements first.
What the Red Dot recognition means in practice
The Red Dot Award is one of the most recognised product design distinctions globally. It is not a hospitality industry award — it evaluates design quality across all sectors, which makes it a more objective measure of whether something has been genuinely well-designed rather than simply well-marketed.
For hotels evaluating beverage dispensing solutions, it offers a useful signal: that the design of IQ Tap was assessed by an independent body and found to meet a high standard — not just in how it looks, but in how it functions within the environment it was built for.
Built for the future of hospitality
The hospitality industry is under increasing pressure to deliver more with less — fewer staff, tighter margins, higher guest expectations, and growing ESG requirements. Beverage service is one of the areas where all of these pressures meet at once.
The Red Dot recognition confirms that the design responds to this reality well — combining operational simplicity, sustainability credentials, and an aesthetic that fits environments where the highest standards are expected. For hotels looking to upgrade their beverage service without adding operational complexity, that combination is rare. And increasingly, it is exactly what the market requires.