A Quick Look At Coffee Vending

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Coffee vending has a lot going for it:

  • Coffee is popular with more than 70% of the adult consumer market
  • People who drink coffee average about 2 – 3 coffee drinks a day
  • Nowadays even teenagers are drinking coffee expanding the market even further
  • Coffee products have over a 50% mark up, sometimes even higher
  • The coffee industry is huge; billions of dollars in coffee products are sold every year
  • Coffee drinks have a price point of $3 to $4

I’m sure everyone of a certain age can remember the vending years from about 20 years ago. For the most part these machines were primarily found in hospitals and pretty famous for producing spectacularly bad coffee, it was simply hot water poured over dehydrated water with maybe a little cream and sugar added. Of course, back then consumers weren’t as sophisticated as they are today, so this coffee probably wasn’t considered as bad as we would consider it today. Fortunately as coffee drinkers have become more accustomed to higher quality coffee drinks, the vending machine market has also been advancing. Consumers today expect fresh ground premium beans; they expect caramel frappaccinos and chocolate mint macchiatos. Well, that is all possible today out of today’s coffee vending machines. The machines currently available can grind whole fresh beans, foam milk and steam milk and add in extra ingredients like chocolate or caramel. Honestly, with the drinks produced by today’s machines you wouldn’t even be able to tell that they were produced by a machine.

Coffee has always been popular, it’s been around for hundreds of years, however the premium coffee market is a relatively new market that has slowly been gaining steam over the last 20 years. It wasn’t that long ago that most people were percolating coffee on the stove top and the only flavor options were plain cream and sugar. Oh, the horror! Today’s consumers are now grinding their own whole beans, using drip coffee makers and flavoring their coffee with a proliferation of creamer options. My grandfather never moved beyond the stove percolator, but most people nowadays wouldn’t choose to go back to the bad old days of coffee. We love our low fat/no whip caramel macchiatos and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Fortunately, coffee vending is easily keeping up with these changing tastes and providing demanding consumers with a top quality product is the way to cash in on the booming coffee market.

A Quick Look At Coffee Vending by
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