Smart stores, micro kiosks and AI tools: Game-changing vending tech from Cantaloupe | Live from 2025 NAMA Show

Explore Cantaloupe Inc.’s latest technology for self-service retail in this exclusive video tour from the 2025 NAMA Show in Las Vegas. Join industry expert Bob Tullio as he visits the Cantaloupe booth to experience the latest innovations for convenience services and unattended retail operators with Elyssa Steiner and Tony Danna.

Highlights include:

• Go Micro Kiosk, an affordable, space-saving self-checkout solution
• Smart Aisle, a secure, just-walk-out technology for high volume or public locations
• Smart Store, a theft-resistant, AI-powered micro market solution with daisy-chain capability
• Point-of-sale advertising, a new revenue stream through digital ad displays on kiosks and vending machines
• Seed platform, business intelligence tools and AI-driven dashboards for smarter operations

With tools to reduce shrink, increase efficiency and boost profitability, this walkthrough showcases technology to help vending, micro market and OCS operators be ready to scale in 2025 and beyond.

To learn more about Cantaloupe Inc.:

• Visit Cantaloupe Inc.
• Call 800-633-0340
• Send a message using our contact form

No time to listen? Prefer to read? Here is a video transcript:

Hi, it’s Bob Tullio, Automatic Merchandiser and Vending Market Watch, and I’m here at the 2025 NAMA Show in Las Vegas at the Cantaloupe exhibit. I’m happy to be here with Elyssa Steiner and Tony Danna.

So, I’m very impressed with your booth. It’s beautiful. But, you’re going to be able to take me on a tour, right?

Elyssa Steiner: Yeah, absolutely. We’re really excited to showcase all of the new self-service technology that we have here today. And the first one that we want to take you to is our Go Micro Kiosk, which is being debuted here for the very first time at the NAMA Show. It is our smallest form factor. It’s also the most affordable kiosk on the market today. So, we’re very excited to show all the operators, both that are current customers or potential future ones, what they can do in implementing smaller micro markets.

We also have an entirely new lineup of modernized kiosks, so you will get an opportunity to see that as well as we take you through the booth. I’m going to turn it over to Tony, though, because he’s going to walk you through our new Go Micro kiosk.

Tony Danna: Thank you, Elyssa. So, Go Micro kiosk. The goal was, as Elyssa said, the most cost-effective and smallest form factor that we could make it. So we have an all-in-one credit card reader and kiosk solution. The kiosk allows you to do just a scan-and-go transaction. So we scan the product, we hit pay on the touch screen here, and then present or insert your credit card.

So, the additional feature that we added here for NAMA was that we wanted users to have the ability to do a market account transaction. So, we added this feature for the show here. Same experience where a consumer can gain loyalty points, run coupons, rewards, loyalty. You’re going to have that ability here with our Go Micro kiosk.

So to pop up with your market account, which you can deposit money onto, and then you also have any employee subsidy or payroll balance on there as well. And you’ll be able to run through all your transactions.

So again, most cost-effective, least amount of footprint. We think this is going to open up a lot of doors for operators around the country to install micro markets.

Bob Tullio: What’s next on the tour? That was pretty cool.

Tony Danna: What’s next on the tour? I’ll hand it over to you Elyssa for that.

Elyssa Steiner: Alright, let’s take you to the Smart Store.

Bob Tullio: So this is the Smart Aisle. I don’t remember seeing this last year.

Elyssa Steiner: You’re right. We did not have it at the NAMA show last year. This is the first time we’re showcasing the Smart Aisle, and it really is a just-walk-out technology solution. So, we’re really excited because there are a lot of operators that have locations that maybe are just flowing through high volumes of transactions. They need something more secure. The micro market can’t suffice, and they really need to step up their options for their client, and/or they want to take it into airports or new locations. And you see similar technology today in airports.

This one we think is a kind of a game-changer because it is far more cost-effective than other solutions out in the marketplace, but also has really great technology powering it so that consumers can’t trick it. So, I’m going to have Tony walk you through the experience of taking you into a smart aisle.

Tony Danna: OK, we’ll go ahead and log in with our Loop app. I scan the QR code. I’m also going to select how many people are going to come in. We’re going to have three people enter with me.

So, now we’re in our Smart Aisle here. I’ve got three people in my same shopping cart. And really what we can do is, any of the people within my shopping cart can just start grabbing items off the shelf. And then you can see it all being added in real time here — different from any product that’s on the marketplace right now, trying to do these smart aisles — we’re showing all the data here in real time. There’s no human intervention that’s happening or necessary with this solution. So now, we could grab our items and just walk right out of the store.

Bob Tullio: That is amazing. Talk to me about the type of application for this type of product.

Tony Danna: Yeah, so right now we’re seeing it, Elyssa mentioned it earlier, where there’s a high volume micro market. You know, we’ve got an installation that was doing $100,000 a month in revenues at a micro market. The location got frustrated with the amount of theft that they had to pay back every month. Very transient workplace, so employees didn’t have a problem stealing, you know, getting let go. That wasn’t a thing that they cared about. So, we made the transition to Smart Aisles and those high theft micro market locations, and we’re seeing a lot of success because we’re seeing the same revenues run through it — without the theft.

The location is super happy. They don’t have to cut that check anymore. And the operator is really happy because they don’t have to have that conversation about theft.

That’s one application, and then public locations. In arenas, we’ve seen these installed. Airports have a lot of success on installations there. Elyssa, I don’t know if you’ve seen any other ones out there.

Elyssa Steiner: I think we’ve also had one of our local operators talk about even putting one here at the convention center. So, lots of applications where we really can make it more available to a more public-facing environment, so we’re really excited about it.

Bob Tullio: What’s next on the tour?

Elyssa Steiner: Let’s take you to our advertising platform. You ready?

Bob Tullio: This is point-of-sale advertising. Tell me about it, please.

Elyssa Steiner: Yeah, absolutely. We’re really excited because we’ve tested this already with a couple of brands, specifically some of our payment partners. And then you’ll see we’re currently running sample Red Bull ads right now. And this is all a part of how do operators drive more revenue by displaying ads at their point-of-sale kiosks or at our digital touchscreen card readers, which you can see here on vending machines. And so, we’re just really excited to be able to offer this opportunity — connect CPGs with the digital point-of-sale screens in front of consumers now, influencing buying habits, influencing them to be able to purchase their products — more of, or take advantage of deals and offers in micro markets — that drive sales up for the operator and generate advertising revenue for operators as well.

Bob Tullio: So the operator does nothing and gets revenue.

Elyssa Steiner: I mean, isn’t that amazing? It sounds beautiful.

Bob Tullio: I think it’s a perfect fit.

Elyssa Steiner: Absolutely.

Bob Tullio: What’s next on the tour?

Elyssa Steiner: We’re going to take you to our Smart Stores.

Bob Tullio: Excellent. So, this is Cantaloupe’s Smart Store Solution. Tell us all about it.

Tony Danna: Yeah, this is the absolute most exciting product I’ve been a part of in my 10 years in this vending industry. It’s exciting because we’re providing a solution that’s a theft-proof solution for our operators, which they’re asking for. And then it’s a solution that just works. It just works today, tomorrow, yesterday. It’s a solution that we brought over from Europe. There are 6,000 live in the field.

So, what we’re seeing here is our 600 Series. We’ve got a 600 Series and a 700 Series. The 700 is going to be taller, wider, deeper. And then the unique thing with our Smart Stores is you can daisy chain. Right now, we’re looking at a duo. A duo could become a trio, and a trio could become a quad. So again, you’re giving the consumers a full micro market experience without the headache of theft. The way this solution works is you’re going to start the transaction by tapping or inserting your card, so we’re doing a pre-authorization here. Once the pre-authorization happens, now we can open the door.

And again, the beauty of a micro market is you can touch and feel the products, read the nutrition labels. So, we’re providing that same solution, but now it’s automatically adding it to our shopping cart here. So, it doesn’t allow the consumer to get away with any theft. And then the other thing that it has, this unit’s got a lot of really good details to it. So even this little LED light showing you where you took the product from. Okay, so if I put the product back in the wrong spot here, the machine is now beeping at me, and it’s saying, “You’re going to be charged for that product unless you put it back in the correct spot.” And now it’s going to remove it from my shopping cart, and I’ve just got the Coke Mini.

The other thing that we did with our solution — and since I’ve been going at it for 10 years, everyone has always asked, “How do we get a coffee machine to account for every transaction?” So, we’ve connected our coffee machine here. If you’ll come on over. So again, we’ve got a shopping cart that’s wide open. And now we’re selecting our coffee, and then if you pan it back over here, the consumer’s now being charged for that coffee. So, without the shopping cart being open, that coffee machine’s not going to work. Now, these operators have the ability to charge $2.50, $3 for a quality cup of coffee, and the ROI starts to make sense on these fairly expensive machines out there.

Bob Tullio: So, the coffee is tied in with the store here. That’s fantastic. That is daisy chaining. That’s fantastic. Anything else you want to point out, feature-wise?

Tony Danna: So, we have, again, with that Loop app that we showed with the Smart Aisle, that same Loop app is going to work with the Smart Store here. So, it’s going to allow you to do employee subsidies. You can do coupons. Also, we just finished up an AI solution that’s going to help you push fresh food. So, fresh food is going to expire on Fridays. It’s going to automatically do promotions for you, and AI’s going to do all that work for you in the back end.

Bob Tullio: That’s great stuff. Thank you so much, Tony. I appreciate it.

There’s more to talk about here at Cantaloupe. Let’s talk about the software platform.

Elyssa Steiner: Thank you. Yeah, we’re really excited because we’re showcasing a lot of our business intelligence tools for our operators, including our new dashboards that include AI components, giving them suggestions on pricing, placement of their products, just making them more and more efficient and sophisticated in how they deliver their products to their customers, and making sure they have the right products at the right time. And we’re just really excited because Seed is really home base to everything to everything that we’ve taken you through today from managing your micro markets, your vending machines, your Smart Aisle, your Smart Stores, all of it inside of one platform, really enabling operators to have one full visibility into all the innovations that power self-service retail for their business.

Bob Tullio: Elyssa, thank you very much. Very, very exciting exhibit.

Elyssa Steiner: Thanks for having us, and thanks for joining me on the tour.

Bob Tullio: My pleasure.