SUSTAINABILITY & EFFICIENCY
Less waste, fewer journeys, smarter vending
S
ustainability within vending is often associated with packaging, recycling and energy-efficient equipment.
These are important, but one of the biggest opportunities for the industry is to make the way vending services are operated considerably more efficient. A vending business can involve thousands
of journeys each year. Merchandisers travel to replenish machines, engineers respond to faults and teams visit sites to check equipment. Without accurate information, some of those journeys may be unnecessary. Technology is helping refreshment systems change that. Through improved telemetry and data collection, we can increasingly understand what is happening at a machine before someone travels to site. Stock information enables replenishment visits to be planned around genuine demand, while machine data can help identify faults remotely and determine whether an engineer actually needs to attend. Steve May, director of Refreshment
Systems, says: “For us, sustainability is not just about the machine itself. It is about looking at the whole service and asking where we can remove waste, unnecessary
journeys and inefficiency. Better data gives us the opportunity to do that while also improving the service customers receive.” This can significantly improve route planning. Instead of servicing every location according to the same fixed schedule, data allows operators to prioritise machines that require stock or attention. Over a large estate, reducing even a relatively small percentage of unnecessary journeys can make a meaningful difference to mileage, fuel consumption, emissions and operating costs. It can improve customer service too. If
an engineer has information about a fault before arriving, they can be better prepared with the correct parts or equipment. The aim is not simply fewer service visits; it is more productive service visits. This is increasingly important as
Refreshment Systems and the wider industry consider the challenge of Net Zero. There will not be one single solution.
Progress will come through a combination of more efficient vehicles, smarter route planning, lower-energy machines, improved refrigeration technology, responsible sourcing, waste reduction, recycling and extending the useful life of equipment wherever possible.
The industry also needs realistic collaboration between operators, manufacturers, suppliers and customers. Sustainability cannot simply be added as another cost or treated as a marketing exercise. The most successful changes will be those that reduce environmental impact while also improving operational performance. For Refreshment Systems, that means using technology and data to continually challenge how we operate. The encouraging part is that sustainability
and commercial efficiency increasingly point in the same direction. Reducing wasted journeys, wasted energy, wasted stock and wasted time creates a better service for customers while helping the industry move towards its Net Zero ambitions.
The wrapper problem hiding inside our snack machines “The result is our recyclable packaging solution, designed to provide
the shelf life, food safety and performance required from an individually wrapped oat bar while offering a more credible end of life solution. “That innovation has already attracted industry recognition. The
Grocer highlighted our 100% recyclable packaging when it covered the SNACK’d launch into Booths, and our packaging has since been selected as a finalist in The Grocer’s packaging awards. “For vending operators, this matters. Their customers include
Individually, a snack bar wrapper weighs almost nothing. Multiply that across an entire industry and the scale of the packaging challenge becomes much harder to ignore. Around 895,000 tonnes of flexible plastic packaging, representing
more than 215 billion individual items, are placed on the UK market each year. Food wrappers form part of that enormous waste stream. For an industry built around convenient, individually wrapped
products, this presents a real sustainability challenge. Damien Gray, founder and chief executive of SNACK’d, says
packaging was one of the biggest issues the company wanted to tackle when developing its new range. “We did not want to accept that a snack bar wrapper simply had to be difficult to recycle,” he says.
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major employers, hospitals, universities and travel operators, many of which have increasingly ambitious sustainability and waste reduction targets. The conversation is no longer only about the efficiency of the machine. It is also about the products and packaging inside it. “The scale of vending means small improvements can become significant when repeated across millions of products. “Sustainability also has to work commercially. Operators need
shelf life and reliability, consumers need convenience and, ultimately, the product still has to taste great. “The future should not be about choosing between those things. It should be about designing products and packaging that deliver all of them.”
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