Snack and drink vending machines: choosing between 36, 60 and 120 selections
If you are buying your first vending machine, this is almost certainly the one. A chilled cabinet with spiral coils handles packaged snacks, chocolate, bottled and canned drinks from a single machine, and it is the format with the most predictable economics.
How many selections do you need?
More selections is not automatically better. Every additional selection is stock sitting in the machine not being sold, and on a small site a 60-selection cabinet simply means more products moving slowly.
| Selections | Suits |
|---|---|
| 36 | Offices under about 100 people, clinics, hostels. Lowest entry cost, and a focused range sells better than a broad one on a small site. |
| 60 | The standard. Offices, factories, campuses. Enough breadth to serve different tastes without stranding stock. |
| 120+ (twin cabinet) | High-footfall sites — transit, large campuses, hospitals. Two cabinets, one payment system, one service visit. |
Spiral drop or elevator?
A spiral coil rotates and the product falls. It is fast, cheap and reliable, and perfectly fine for crisps, chocolate, biscuits and cans.
An elevator carries the product down to the pickup port instead. It costs more and is slower, and it is the right answer whenever a drop would damage what you are selling — glass bottles, eggs, ready meals, premium chocolate in hot weather, anything in soft packaging.
If your product list is entirely robust packaged goods, the elevator is money you do not need to spend. If it includes even a few fragile lines, it pays for itself in products not destroyed and customers not annoyed.
Keypad or touchscreen?
A keypad is cheap, fast and nearly unbreakable. Where the product list is short and the customers are regulars — a factory, a hostel, an office floor — it is the better choice, not the budget one.
A 22-inch touchscreen earns its cost in two situations: where customers need to see what they are buying because the range changes or is unfamiliar, and where you can sell the screen as advertising. In a high-footfall site the screen can be a revenue line in its own right.
Chilled or ambient
If you are selling drinks or anything dairy, chilled. If you are selling only dry packaged goods in an air-conditioned building, ambient is cheaper to buy and markedly cheaper to run. In an unconditioned Indian corridor, chilled is usually worth it even for chocolate.
The satellite cabinet
Worth knowing about: a satellite cabinet extends an existing machine's selections while sharing its payment system. If your site has outgrown one machine but does not justify a second full one, this is the cheaper middle option.
Get the shelf configuration right at installation. Spiral gauge and shelf pitch are adjustable, and setting them for the products you actually sell prevents the most common operating complaint — products that hang on the coil instead of dropping. It takes twenty minutes at commissioning and saves months of irritation.
Snack & Drink Vending Machine
The workhorse. Chips, biscuits, chocolate, cold drinks and water from one cabinet — or two cabinets run as one.
See the machine
