Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in September 2018 and has been updated for accuracy.
Introducing Healthy Food Options into the Vending Machine Product Mix
When you think of vending machines, your mind probably goes to junk food. Items like soft drinks, chips, candy bars, all loaded with sugar, fat, salt, carbs and other dubious ingredients, are commonly sold in vending machines. However, this is changing. As people become more aware of their lifestyle choices, health and wellness are becoming more trendy and profitable.
A major market for healthy food vending are workplaces. People are often too busy to pack their own lunch or to buy or order food, and offering healthy and nutritious options at office vending machines can be beneficial for both employees and their welfare. By working together with employers and human resources departments, vending machine operators can add healthier products to the mix such as salads, sandwiches, protein bars, and dried fruit snacks.
Nayax’s management software, NayaxVend, allows operators to manage prepaid cards, which are perfect for closed-loop environments. With this powerful management tool, you can coordinate with the employers and create loyalty programs for their workers and offer them welfare benefits. That way, employees can get special prices when they pay for products with their employee cards or with a digital prepaid card through the Monyx Wallet payment and loyalty app, further encouraging them to eat more healthy food. With Monyx Wallet, you can not only add a daily, weekly, or monthly balance to digital prepaid cards, but also manage different discounts and promotions such as top-up bonuses, punch card campaigns, happy hour promotions, discounts on specific products, and more!
Real-Time Monitoring and Telemetry Technology
Loyalty programs and convenient ways to pay for products are not the only way that vending machine management apps can help you introduce healthy foods into your vending machines. Other technologies such as telemetry allow you to receive information from various vending machines to a centralized location: NayaxVend. This allows you to oversee all of your machines, ensuring that stock levels are in line, and that fresh products won’t spoil. You can also receive temperature alerts, which will let you know if anything is wrong with your refrigerated machines so that you can fix them right away instead of only realizing there is an issue when you’re on a site visit.
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Boost Your Sales with Healthy Food Vending
Introducing healthy options to your vending machines will increase your appeal for consumers who are looking for healthy or green options. A study by the CDC found that when healthy food options were introduced there was a steady increase in vending machine monthly sales. Within 14 months, monthly sales went from $84 to $371 per machine.
But like all product mixes, some healthy foods are more popular than others. This is where Nayax’s management tools come in again. By keeping track of which products sell more or less by building customized reports and dashboards in the HYPERLINK “https://www.nayax.com/solution/moma”MoMa 2.0 mobile management , you can better understand which products you should stock more of or less of and which machine or at which location. You can also provide your consumers with more product information such as nutrition facts – just add the product information to your products in MoMa 2.0 and they will appear to your customers who pay with Monyx Wallet.
Expanding into Micro Market Vending
Vending machines are a great way to make a profit, but with micro markets, you can make anywhere from 2-6x more. Micro markets are small store with a self-checkout kiosk that allow customers to grab and go. For vending operators, especially vending operators that already have vending machines in a closed-loop environment such as a workplace or university, expanding into micro markets is a great way to grow your business with minimal starting costs.
Micro markets enable vending operators to sell more varied products at higher prices without worrying if there is enough space for them in their vending machine. This is an excellent way to sell healthy food options such as salads, sandwiches, and even sushi. And since self-checkout kiosks such as Nova Market have large screens, you can use MoMa 2.0 to add your products‘ nutritional facts so that they can see them on the screen, helping consumers choose which products are right for them. Want to learn more about how to build a micro market business, click here to read our guide.
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The Bottom Line: Increase Your Bottom Line with Healthy Food Vending
Introducing healthy food options is not only simple with the proper management tools, but can greatly increase your bottom line. With loyalty tools, the right products to appeal to your crowd, and efficient management tools, you can grow your business in a matter of months. To learn more about Nayax’s solutions, contact us here.
