School Vending: A Primer For Success

There are different vending carrots for different industries. Hotel vending needs are quite different from factories which are different from sports facilities which are different from the endless cubicles at the white collar employers. Recognizing and understanding the specific needs of different vending categories encourages successful client solicitations and eliminates a lot of expensive, wasted marketing efforts. This is especially true for the vending needs of public schools.

Having worked intimately with close to a thousand vending companies as an equipment supplier for over 25 years, I am familiar with the fact that certain vending operators enjoy exceptional success serving specific industries. There are also categories of opportunities many vending companies avoid like leprosy. This has certainly been the case with public schools.

Vending companies have stayed away in droves. Admittedly there are some good reasons for that. The nutritional standards for school vending have progressively become more challenging, fueled by political correctness and a perceived obesity crisis.

Many presume that public school vending machines are trashed regularly, having heard exaggerated anecdotal testimony. Many presume this arena is simply a battleground for who offers the highest “pretend” commissions.

Some are concerned about making an equipment investment with special configurations and then being asked to leave after only one year for one excuse or another. Some worry about timer requirements decimating sales in expensive machines.

We hear the reports of the genius politicians that think the answer to obesity is to ban vending machines to Siberia. I particularly love that one. Have you ever heard the cliché about throwing the baby out with the bath water? And politicians wonder why people think they are senseless.

A vending machine is simply a store. One can put anything they want on the store shelves. Stores are not
the problem.

On the flip side, we could ask if we might just want to have vending accounts where hundreds and sometimes thousands of hungry young people with cash gather to eat on a daily basis. Their enviable metabolisms allow them to consume ridiculous amounts of food and beverages without showing it … Oh, the glory days of yore.

We could also point out that the competitor pool would shrink in our pursuit of schools, as many avoid soliciting schools, at least outside the very low volume teachers’ break rooms. The vending sales volumes in school cafeterias are invariably incredibly higher than business and industry locations.

Schools are our community centers where activities continue from before sunrise to well after sunset for six and even seven days each week. Sports, clubs, drama, adult education, community gatherings and regional events bring people to our school vending machines in addition to the six hours of public education for 180 days every year. Schools offer better than average opportunities for vending operators, but they are not without unique challenges. So when has life been easy?

Whenever we see opportunity, we will always face obstacles. Potential has no value if it will not be exercised. The key is knowing how to safely and profitably convert that potential into advantage.

I will be happy to define the tools and the realities we face in addressing the significant potential within school vending. This explanation would be valueless without credibility. What I offer is not conjecture or theory. I’ve been there and done that. You can too.

After having invested a great deal of money and time in the New York market, my vending equipment distribution company immediately lost $1 million in annual sales when the events of 9/11 stunned our country and the Northeast economy in 2001. When we realized the sales were not going to come back, we decided to offer full-line vending services to the school market which extremely few vending companies were addressing. The few that were offering these services were doing it rather poorly, due to the absence of any real competition.