PRO CHMEL – The world's first app for more efficient hop production

What happens when critical players in the brewing industry join forces with software experts? An innovative research project by Plzeňský Prazdroj and its parent company, Asahi, aimed to optimize hop production. The result is a groundbreaking application that transforms hop growers' operations, enhancing efficiency and sustainability in hop cultivation.

In just three months, we developed a progressive web application that integrates complex data and, based on this information, provides hop growers with practical advice for more efficient irrigation. This was made possible through PWA technology and the shared storage and logic for both frontend and backend development. This approach allowed the application to be quickly tested in a pilot phase.

The PRO CHMEL application addresses the long-standing issue of water scarcity, which threatens Czech hop yields. Over two years, we mapped field conditions so thoroughly that hop growers can now mitigate the adverse effects of weather by adjusting irrigation. As a result, some farmers in the pilot phase reported up to a 40% increase in yields compared to previous years. Our work is having a tangible impact on the entire brewing industry.