Ideas for Healthy Vending

One of the major challenges facing a 21st Century operator in vending is the pressure to become more environmental or health concious for the end user - more nutrious snack items in machines and movement away from soft drinks to isotonic + non-carbonated items, all placed inside machines that deliver greater energy savings.

As a retail outlet, a snack machine is 60% of the time priced higher than that of a local supermarket in order to cover costs of a 24hr offer and with healthy items priced even higher than normal snacks, those wishing to simply purchase a good old Mars bar will end up trekking to the shop - a negative for both the client who ends up losing man hours best spent working, and the operator in their cashflow. What do we do?

Branding of machines has become of more importance in public sites; wobble stickers and in-tray POS certainly direct people to the right area; psychology says that people are predispositioned in certain situations, in our case it is the punter who is expecting to see loads of Mars Bars and Snickers. By visually pointing out areas where healthy items are, you can expect to see an increase in client satisfaction and also sales.

Wherever possible, clients and operators are taking the opportunity to market specific items within vending machines, and to do this successfully you need to ensure that the offer contained within remains FRESH. Introduce a monthly rotational guest line, from stock products that you have determined to be rotational, and continually monitor the sales. Seasonality can play a big part, and I always make sure that we introduce more nutritional items in the month on January, when most people are looking to do their "detoxing"; Skinny Water is destined to be a good seller this year.

Percy Daltons have remarketed a great selection of healthy nut mixes, some of them can even count towards your "five a day". As a business development manager placing these items in machines across the UK, the cashew nuts are one of the best sellers for me, and can be priced at a relatively impressive 60p.

I recently partnered with a good friend of mine, Nick Fletcher, on bringing a "Pick and Mix" machine to the UK from Holland. The bulk vendors are branded up with funky, friendly and modern graphics and you simply chose from 5 canisters what you would like vended, or "mixed" into a 100g branded container. Each pot is one of your "five-a-day" and all the nuts are extremely healthy. Expect to see further developments in a few months once we place on more sites and develop the offer further.

Healthy vending has suffered a huge downturn in the last year due to the recession, with operators demanding they put more top sellers into the machines as the volumes to sustain simply arent there. I firmly believe that by marketing the offer well, encouraging offers in seasonal times, and by chosing the right offer for the client, healthy vending can revolutionise our industry in the next few years.

What are YOU doing about healthy vending?