As a vendor, you may log a lot of hours on the road driving vending trucks. A lot can happen while doing this, so it’s good to be prepared for any possibility.

Filling vending machines is the bread and butter of any vending business. This is a step by step guide for what to do when you go to any location as well as how to modify these instructions to suit different combinations of machines and methods of servicing them. It’s recommended that you also read our article Filling Vending Machines: An Introduction

This article is an introduction to what you need to know to fill vending machines. You may also want to check out our
step-by-step, vending machine filling guide.Filling vending machines is an art. It requires both muscle memory and an expanded awareness of the entire machine at once. It’s so very easy to miss something wrong with a machine while you’re focused on another aspect of it.

Healthy vending is the hottest buzz word in the vending business today. Hopefully, it is the future of not only vending, but of American eating habits. Having said that, we’re going to look at both the desires of people and at the reality of healthy products in vending.

According to the most recent NAMA tradeshow, mini retail is a 7 billion dollar opportunity, which is about 17% of the vending market in the U.S. 5.1 billion of this is in a micro market.

Route driving is where the money is made and where there is the most pressure. If done correctly, route driving can be efficient and enjoyable. If done incorrectly it can take forever and feel like a chore. Which one do you want?

A good business person is a master of inventory. Besides equipment breaking down, incorrect ordering or inventory management can be the largest cost to your business in the long run. Ordering is something that you need to rigorously track. You need to keep track of both what sells and what tends to expire. Though snacks and sodas have significantly more shelf life than vegetables or other perishables, they still expire and must be rotated. When ordering, strike the perfect balance between cost, variety, and storage space. Ideally you want to order certain product that you know will sell, which varies by region, city, and company. Yet you should also budget for testing out new product in the machines every time you fill them.

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If your business is large enough, you’ll need to store extra product somewhere other than on your vending truck. However, if you just use a truck, storing product follows similar principles.

Your storage area should be organized in a fashion that you find easy to use. I recommend that you organize by type and then make dedicated places for everything that you order consistently. Let’s use our 10,000 square foot warehouse as an example:

When stacking beverages, you want them to be as easy as possible to retrieve when loading your truck. 12 oz soda cans specifically benefit from being stacked in an alternating brick pattern, which is shown below.

This offers the most stability, which is a boon when a pallet is stacked ten layers high. This is much more preferable to stacking cases on top of the other in the same orientation, which will guarantee structural instability at a certain height. Water and other 20 oz beverages benefit from a similar stacking method, however since the case size and volume is larger, there are less cases per layer (6 as opposed to 8).

This stacking principle applies everywhere. If you’re transporting the soda in a pickup truck, stack it this way to minimize the amount it moves when driving.

In general, you should always check the expiration dates on your product as it comes into the warehouse. Do not automatically assume that if you bought this product later than the last product, that it will expire later. Make sure to rotate your product in your warehouse, in your truck, and in your machines.

Be especially mindful of expiration dates on beverages in the winter time, because the bottler will more likely deliver short-dated product since the demand for that product is low.

If you find yourself running out of space, store product on a high shelf above arms reach. To store product, you can use a ladder. To get product down either use the same ladder or bend a wire coat hanger so that it is completely straight save for a hook on the end.

You can then store chips, soups, crackers, cookies, and other relatively light cases of product on that high shelf and use the hooked wire to pull them down. If you do this, use a gentle pulling motion so you can safely bring the product off the shelf.

To increase beverage storage space, you can place pallets of beverages on top of each other using a forklift.

Managing your inventory, locations, and books in vending can be a nightmare. If you’re a small time vendor with only a few machines, you want to spend all your time giving great customer service and expanding your business, not keeping your paperwork up to date.

Route driving consists of four different sets of skills. If you are the sole owner/operator of your business it would benefit you to increase your ability in the following four areas:

The first thing that you must consider when making a business plan is, “Does the math work?” Many people first get the idea to get into vending because the notion of passive income and working for themselves is so compelling. While this is true, they forget to see if it even makes sense for them first.

The difference between good scheduling and bad scheduling can be the difference between profit and loss. Depending on the proximity of your locations, scheduling will become more or less important. If all your locations are in the same building, then this isn’t as much of an issue. On the other hand, if you have locations that are hundreds of miles apart, scheduling becomes really important. The most important thing to understand about scheduling is that it is fluid. Often times you will create the day’s schedule only to have to completely change it later to meet the demands of your customers.