Cantaloupe Inc., a digital payments and software services company that provides end-to-end technology solutions for self-service commerce, announced that its Cantaloupe Seed platform has been adopted by the Buffalo Rock Company, a leading family-owned Pepsi and Dr Pepper bottler in the U.S.
Buffalo Rock operates 14 franchise locations across Alabama, Georgia and Florida, running 9,000 vending machines, 450+ micro markets, and 1,400 office coffee service (OCS) delivery points.
According to the announcement, the company is already a customer of Cantaloupe’s ePort card readers in many of its vending locations, but this commitment showcases Buffalo Rock's confidence in Cantaloupe's complete product offering by fully integrating their operations within the Seed software platform — an industry-leading vending management systems (VMS).
“Life before Seed was very manual and inefficient," Kyle Murphy, corporate business development director for the Buffalo Rock’s on-premise department, said in the announcement. "We were filling machines and micro markets either by forecast, which was not always accurate, or by manually counting what was in the machine and then going back to the truck and manually picking on-site. In working with Cantaloupe, we’re better able to identify what the machines need before we load the trucks, which means we can reduce the number of bring-backs and amount of time spent at each location.”
After a successful pilot with the Seed software platform in spring 2022, Buffalo Rock recognized how using Seed allowed them to schedule routes dynamically, provided visibility into vending machine performance, and helped reduce product returns to the warehouse.
Another reason that Buffalo Rock chose Cantaloupe is because of its ability to transition large enterprise operations onto the Seed platform quickly with Seed Sync, Cantaloupe’s API solution to connect third-party devices and machines into Seed. Alongside the hands-on training provided by Cantaloupe’s customer success management team, Seed Sync highlights inefficiencies in operators’ processes and helps direct where they should invest time and resources for improvement.
Murphy noted that using Seed Sync made a difference in showing them opportunities within their business that could be corrected immediately. “Using Seed Sync has given us the intelligence to identify machines with issues so we can go out and fix them. Without it, we would never have known we had room for improvement," Murphy continued.
"We are excited to partner with Buffalo Rock and support them in their efforts to optimize their supply chain operations," Jeff Dumbrell, CRO of Cantaloupe Inc., added in the announcement. "The adoption of our Seed platform is a testament to the value and effectiveness of our solutions, and we look forward to continuing to work with Buffalo Rock to help them grow their business.”
As it continues its integration with the Seed platform, Buffalo Rock is eager to incorporate its micro market and OCS business into the system, which adds an extra layer of customer service improvement and enables its team to manage accounts through a single dashboard. “Through our use of Seed, we are servicing our customers better. Our machines are being stocked regularly and our card readers can take payments reliably,” Murphy added in the announcement. “Now we can focus more of our attention on growing the business and maintaining the high level of service that we’re known for.”
