Healthy Snacks And Sales

Healthy snacks can be a profitable item for vending machines and let’s talk about the different ways. If they are profitable why not fill your machines with healthy items and help us overweight people eat healthier?

Here is the answer: we don’t always feel like a healthy snack. Sometimes we just plain and simply want a bag of potato chips or maybe a candy bar.

A doctors son that was the plant manager at my largest vending account once told me his fathers favorite phrase was: You can eat anything and everything in moderation.

How Does It Affect Sales

Many venders tell me that the healthy items are hurting their sales and are the cause of too many stales. I would agree with the statement that it could hurt if you are not careful on the stales side of the equation.

So how can you service the healthy snack food people without cutting into your profits? I think that most people will purchase a healthy item from time to time even if it is only one time in a month when they are feeling like they need to lose weight.

In a large facility there are always some people that are eating healthy even though that is not a large number. So, how do we take care of them and still make a profit?

Offering Healthy Snacks And Stales

If you are worried about stales and the account is not a large account that can handle a full column of snacks cut your par level down to half a column per healthy snack.

If you want to make sure your drivers know how full to fill the column take some masking tape and place it at the desired level. This way your driver knows not to go beyond that point when filling the healthy snack.

How many healthy snacks should be available in a snack machine is a question some venders ask. That really depends on the account. I think that a few items should be offered in every machine. To hold down on stales, (as major manufactures are raising the point that they want healthier employees) come up with a game plan.

The Game Plan

Use the healthy items to land more of the large accounts that are rightfully yours. Take the right or left side of your snack machine and offer the employee a choice of healthy or regular snacks in each machine.

A snack column is usually twice as wide as a candy column. So give the account from the top of the machine to the bottom of the machine on the left or right side one snack column wide filled with healthy snacks.

When you get to the candy column you will give them two columns on that side of the machine. This makes a nice look to the machine especially if you mark the healthy items with a green pusher or label.

Now you have given up 16% to 18% of your machine to healthy choices and by limiting the par levels you should be able to keep stales under control.

Summary

Take the initiative and keep healthy snacks under control. Pick up new business by being able to say your machines have a healthy blend of items. Who knows, there could come a day when healthy items are the larger selling items in your machines.

I remember when the seat belt law came in to effect, at first I resisted buckling up, but now it is just the norm. As with the seat belt law, choosing a healthy snack could also become the norm.

Price Increases

What Will A Price Increase Do?

Price increases will help improve your profit margin. It will also help absorb the wholesale increases.

Here Are The Most Common Reasons To Delay A Price Increase

You are afraid your customers will notice the increase and be angry or disappointed in you. You feel comfortable with your current level of income. You don't know how much you should raise your prices. You are not seeing your competition raising their prices. You're afraid you will just have to work harder to sell the same amount of merchandise.

Five Ways You Can Smoothly Handle Raising Your Prices

Increase your prices regularly. Slowly raising prices at regular intervals will help you keep up with inflation and may even keep you ahead of inflation. By raising your prices once a year in small increments you won't attract much attention.

Pick A Month You Will Raise Prices

So many vending companies get out of the habit of raising their prices. Then they find themselves forced to make a major price increase. A major increase draws the attention of your customers and will come as a surprise to them.
It is much better to raise your prices more frequently in smaller amounts. Raising the price of chips one year, candy the following year and pastries the year after that helps to lessen the shock of a price increase.
In the vending business your wholesale prices will slowly increase. Many times a wholesale increase will be as low as .25 cent per unit. Many vendors are lulled to sleep with such a small increase but over time they do add up.
After a few years without a price increase the vendor finds themselves without the capital to make needed improvements. Take the philosophy that the wholesaler takes and increase more regularly in smaller amounts.

Establish Quality And The Price Will Follow

Quality needs to be established before a price increase can be warranted. When I speak of quality I'm speaking of both product quality and quality customer service. In the vending business service and product quality must go hand in hand.
Quality of your service comes in the form of deliveries being made on a regular schedule. This includes the machines being kept clean, filled to the prescribed fill level and, of course, working. As the owner of a vending company you need to have a program in place that ensures the driver is doing a good job and not cutting corners.
Name Brands Sell. An example of this would be Baby Ruth and not Baby Ruth Crisp. The crisp bar does come at a lower price but with the limited amount of space a vending machine has it's not advisable to try saving a few pennies this way.
Establish quality in your service and the products you carry. By doing this you have a winning combination that is hard to beat and customers don't mind paying for.

Offer Different Sizes

You can add new sizes of product to your machines to enable an increase. If you are only handling the vend size chip add the LSS (large single serve) bags to your line up. When you add the bigger bags it is a good time to raise the price on your vend size bags. By giving your customers a choice of sizes they will respond more favorably to the small bags new price.

Serve Your Customer Better

As we talked earlier, give the customer what they want: quality products and good service. You will find the price issue just goes away. People enjoy doing business with people they like and trust. Remember, always listen to what your customers want and over deliver. They will be willing to pay for it.

Let Your Customers Know Why You Are Increasing Your Prices

There are different feelings on how to let your customers know of an increase. I tell my contact at every location in person. I then like to put a sign on the machine that reads like the statement below:

Notice

We value our customers and appreciate the patronage that you have given us over the years. However, due to manufacturer increases our suppliers have increased their prices. To help offset some of the costs we will be increasing our prices.

Thank You

ABC Vending Company

Large Vending Companies

Is it possible to enter the vending business today and compete against the large vending companies? You will not get as good of pricing as they do from the suppliers. Your machines will cost you more. So how can you compete?

Service and never forget it. The large corporations have their problems and in most cases it is giving good service. Give me your thoughts.

Vending Truck For Smaller Operators

I’m going to cover the way many smaller vending companies set their truck up. We will talk about the rack you put in the van, keeping it warm in the winter months and cool in the summer months. Let’s get started.

Smaller Account Truck

When starting out in the business as a sole proprietor we will normally be looking at accounts in the 75 to 250-employee range. You can set your truck up to be your warehouse on wheels.

Most venders in this category will use a system were they will go into the account and write an order then come back to their truck to pull the order.

By using this system when you are done you will have empty totes going back to your truck.

Safe Keeping Of Your Money

It is a wise idea to either buy a safe that can be bolted to the floor or making one. The nicest safe is a roll top truck safe you drop your money in and roll the top, your money drops into a locked compartment and the top rolls back for the next deposit.

Coolers For Chocolate And Cold Food

Transporting cold food can be accomplished by investing in a cooler that is built specifically for vendors. The Omni coolers pictured below are set up to carry all the refrigerated items you will need to become a full service vendor.

The unit is plugged in over night and it cools a large freezer plate on the inside of the unit that will keep your cold food cold the entire next day.

You can also buy chocolate coolers that have removable freezer plates. You remove the plates each night and drop them in a freezer to freeze them down then put them back in the cooler before leaving in the morning.

Building A Rack

If you are handy with wood it is not a difficult task building a rack to carry your dry goods. I always used ¼” plywood and 2 x 2’s for the frame.

By making the bottom shelves tall enough to carry a 20 oz case of pop you are able to keep the weight down low in your vehicle. The top shelf should have enough room that you can put cases of chips on it.

Pop will take up a good portion of the rack, as it is one of the most popular items you sell.

Keeping The Van Cool

I bought an AC/DC exhaust fan from an RV store and installed it on top of my van. I wired it with a toggle switch-one way it was wired into my battery on the van. Toggle it the other way and it could be plugged in at night to 110 volt with a converter that changed the 110-volt to 12 volt.

This helped with excess heat as my truck set out overnight and on the weekends.

Keeping The Van Warm In The Winter

If you live in a cold climate and the truck will be left outside you can run an electric heater to keep soda from freezing. It will keep the vans box warm over night.

If you are driving a Ford E350 van with a door going between the cab and the box you can keep the box warm enough to be comfortable while pulling an order.

Summary

The van I have just described to you is set up for the vender who goes in the account writes an order and comes back to the van to pull the order.

This system will require a two-wheeler and two or three plastic tubs to carry your product in.

Starting A Snack Box Business

Timing is everything, so they say. When it comes to starting a snack box business there is really no bad time. Snacks are an impulse item and when the boxes are placed the impulse makes your sales for you.

The winter months are a time that chocolate won’t melt. People seem to snack heavier in the winter months.  These two things make the winter months slightly better for starting a snack box business.

The slowest time of the year in the snack box business is all but over. The second week of December through the third week of January is the slowest time of the year in the snack box business.

Our mothers and wives start their baking about the second week of December and then comes the New Years resolutions. The New Years resolutions are coming to an end the third week of January.

In summary, the Christmas candy is gone the New Years diet has ended so it is the perfect time to start a snack box business.

Stale Products

Stale Product

Most all food items have an expiration date posted on the labels. Sometimes it is a julian date and sometimes it is a regular date.

There are many products that have such a long life on them that a vendor can be lulled into just assuming they are still in code. Keeping an eye on stales is a must, as most people can get rather upset over buying an item that is out of date.

It just may cost you an account if the wrong person buys or hears of the problem.

Shortest Coded Items

Cold food machines are the machines that have the shortest coded items in them. Sandwiches, salads, burritos, and meal entrees need to be checked every time you open the door.

The next shortest coded item is pastries. You will get about 10 days to 6 weeks to sell them. Pies are the shortest coded pasties I can think of at this moment.

Then come chips, crackers and cookies most of these products will have 6 to 12 weeks of life on them.

How To Dispose Of Stales

I know of no special way you are to dispose of stale product. Putting them in a dumpster is the common way. There are some companies that will take your food stales for a price and add them to a compost pile enabling you to say that you have gone green.

How To Keep Stales Under Control

If you are checking for stales every time you open the door of your machines or each time a snack box is refilled you will rarely have this problem.

If you have employees it is something you will want to train them to do or you could have a huge headache. Remember the date is the manufacturers suggested date but to your customer it may be a rigid line in the sand they refuse to cross over. When you are checking dates remember to factor in the next time you will be servicing this account.

Handling A Customer That Bought A Stale Item

In my opinion there is only one way to handle a customer that has purchased an out of date or stale item. That is to give them their money back, apologize, and let them know you are going to be taking corrective action to see that it does not happen again.

What Is An Acceptable Stale Percentage

Most vending companies think that stales should not run over 2% of the gross sales of product. If you are a snack box operator that % will run a little higher.

Summary

I don’t believe it is ever worth it to leave a stale in any machine or snack box. You must factor in the next time you will service the account and remove product that will become stale before you return.

I would like you to think of stales like this. They are a part of our business, they need to be controlled and you will never eliminate all of them. Is it worth losing an account that is putting $20,000.00 per year into your yearly income?

That could be the consequence for leaving a stale item in one more day.

Card Readers And Institutions.

Recently the credit card companies raised the price to vendor's with card readers. Can someone help me with which side of the business got hit? Was it the debit card or the credit card transactions?

Today I would like to talk a bit about closed loop card readers. Some colleges, prisons and other locations have set up, what I call, closed loop card readers (we will use prisons going forward in this article).

The way it works is a machine is set up that sells a card to a new customer and at the same time puts some credit on the card for the purchaser. The machine is close to the same size as a bill changer and works in a similar manner. A new customer puts in a $20.00 bill into a bill acceptor and normally $18.00 credit is put on the card. The other two dollars is a one time fee charged for the card.

When the card gets low on credit, the customer returns to the same machine. They put their card into the card slot and deposit a $20.00 bill, and the card is credited with $20.00.

The card machines money is collected daily by the prison and deposited into the prisons account. The machines in a prison are set up with only card readers so that cash does not work in them.

As a customer spends money in the machine it keeps track of how much money has been spent. Usually once per week the vendor will use a handheld device to download the sales information. It is then processed back at the office and a statement is sent to the prison for payment.

These readers keep track of a lot of information. Lets say that one of the inmates claims a machine took advantage of them. You, the vendor, can go back and check to see if that inmate even made a transaction at the time they are claiming the machine took advantage of them. Many machines will give them the credit back if they do not receive their product and you the vendor can check your records to see if it did.

Can you see where a card reader could help you gain business? 

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