Reasons to Have a Coffee Machine in Your Workplace
Coffee is one of the most valuable traded commodities in the world, second only to oil. A nice cup of coffee, made from a Coffee Vending Machine, is the perfect way to start in the morning or it can keep you company during the day. More importantly, coffee is a core part of the workday. But what is coffee without a good coffee machine in your office?
At work, the good old coffee pot is not enough to satisfy the different cravings of your employees and customers anymore. People want espresso, latte, cappuccino, hot chocolate and some even demand soup out of their office coffee machines.
Recent studies revealed that employees think that high-quality coffee offered by employers is a vital workplace perk, proving that the company cares about its workers. So it is time to deal with the fact that having a coffee machine in your workplace is a necessity, even more so than pens and paper nowadays.
Four Reasons Why You Need a Coffee Vending Machine in The Office
Investing in a quality coffee machine for your business does not only have benefits for employees, but it can improve the whole work environment and increase workers’ productivity. If you are still not sure why or whether you need a coffee vending machine in your office, here are four excellent reasons to have one.
1. Coffee Improves Productivity at Work
Caffeine is a strong stimulant that helps employee fight off sluggishness and keeps mental alertness, energy, and endurance at work. Throughout the workday, most people undergo a decline in mental abilities. Because of the normal human biorhythm, many people feel mental acuity to flag at around 10 AM and 2 PM. This is connected to the production of a chemical responsible for sleepiness, adenosine, which links to receptors that slow down brain activity. The more adenosine, the more you feel tired. Caffeine has a similar structure to adenosine, binding to the same receptors but as it is not adenosine, the sleepiness effect is not felt.
*Check Out this Video By TED-ED if you would like to know more.
2. Coffee in The Office Helps Networking
Taking a coffee break with colleagues during the workday is nowadays a widespread and ingrained habit in office culture. Meeting or inviting co-workers to take a coffee is a perfect occasion to foster relationships, network and talk things over in a more relaxed way. The Swedes even have a word for it, ‘Fika,’ and they believe that it’s during the coffee break that most work gets done.
A study at MIT proved that coffee breaks have a positive effect of increasing the strength of groups in the workplace and they also increase productivity. Having a cup of coffee in the office with your colleagues may also create a space where new ideas are born. People tend to exchange opinions by merely chatting over a cup of something hot.
3. Coffee Makes Workers Happy
“Depresso,” the feeling you get when you have run out of your coffee can be a real productivity killer. In a Harvard study, women who drank 4 or more cups of coffee per day had a 20% lower risk of becoming depressed. Caffeine affects the level of dopamine and serotonin in the brain, preventing their re-absorption, which makes you feel happy. Obviously, the happiness of employees is proportionate to the number of coffee varieties they can choose, so having a proper office coffee machine is fundamental to keep workers happy and foster a positive work environment.
4. Coffee Keeps People Honest at Work
Fortune reports that “People who get too little sleep are prone to go along with unethical practices at work unless they up their caffeine intake”. Sleep-deprived people are more susceptible to undertake unethical behaviors but caffeine can help strengthen will-power and self-control. Employers should always make sure they don’t overwork their employees, but sometimes it’s not up to them to decide how much rest they get. What is up to them, though, is how much coffee they offer in the workplace. To ensure that employees are on their best ethical behavior, plenty of coffee should be available at all times.
Even More, Reasons to Get a Coffee Vending Machine for Your Business
These are only four of the many good reasons why having a coffee machine at work is important. Overall, being able to take a break from work and enjoy a good cup of coffee makes people happier and better at their jobs. Of course, coffee is not the only thing you need for a healthy and productive work environment, but it is a way for an employer to show his or her employees that they care about them.
Employees will typically take breaks and socialize during working hours, whether they have a coffee machine or not. Employers can encourage this behavior to show that they respect their workers’ needs. In turn, employees who feel like their needs are taken into consideration, will work better and avoid sneaking behind the boss’ back. A simple gesture like getting a coffee machine for your workplace can go a long way to make everybody happier and more productive.
Sources : https://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160112-in-sweden-you-have-to-stop-work-to-chat https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/top-13-evidence-based-health-benefits-of-coffee#section4 https://fortune.com/2014/04/16/how-coffee-can-keep-workers-honest/ video -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foLf5Bi9qXs&t=92s
Vending in Schools is an up and coming Vending Opportunity In this episode of the Vending Business Show, we interview Larry Towner, a successful vending operator, and vending business consultant. He shares valuable tips about Vending in Schools, .
Episode Transcript:
Tom Shivers Vending in Schools I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show, and today, we’re here with Larry Towner, of course, who is a vending business consultant with Service Group International. We’ve got a interesting topic today, which is kind of unique for this particular year, about Vending in Schools so tell us what we’re going to talk about today, Larry.
Larry Towner: Well, today we’re going to talk about everybody favorite topic, that’s vending in schools. We all know that healthy vending in schools is coming, whether we want to believe it or not, there is now legislation. It’s early July here, and we are … Well, we originally were talking about impending events in our last video, and so we were discussing this concept, Tom and I were, and we decided we needed to do some impending events that’ll affect you right now that you can take out and use today, and that will be able to be used year after year and month after month, for that matter.
We came up with this concept of doing this, the healthy vending in schools, due to the recent legislation put into place by the Obama administration, saying that healthy vendors, there’s going to be certain healthy vending aspects that need to be done in school. The reason that we’re presenting it at this time is we know in the future that healthy vending is going to be an increasing part of our product mix as we go forward through time.
If we don’t get it legislated into our business, we’re going to end up … our customers are going to end up demanding it. Whether they really will eat it or not is another story, but they will demand it eventually, so you need to be preparing for that concept of healthy vending, and so we decided we would talk about … we would kind of wrap the school vending together with the healthy vending, and make it Healthy Vending in Schools because they really go hand in hand. That was one of the things that came out in our impending events. We know this is going to happen. Well, right now, you have to do it if you’re going to do vending in schools, and you know it’s going to be an increasing amount of our business as time goes on.
So, some of the challenge that we think are showing up in healthy vending really has a lot to do with product selection. It’s been difficult to identify the products that meet these requirements that the government has put down upon us, and so what we found is … I sort of had an idea that this might happen because we didn’t see a whole lot of push back from the various big companies like Frito Lay or Coca-Cola or Pepsi, and so what happened is, is they had products basically ready to go. They just didn’t launch them until this healthy vending initiative got passed through the legislation.
We wanted to give you a couple of resources, because we’re here about … At A&M Equipment Sales, and when we do these things, we want to give you the resources that you can go out and do the kind of work that you need to do. I’m going to take the screen that I have here and I’m just going to show you all some screen shots that we’ve taken off the internet. They give you a couple of resources that are available to you out there, as far as for healthy vending resources.
One of them is a website called HealthierGeneration.org. Actually, if you go to their home page, which I’ll scoot back to their home page, and I’ll show you how to kind of run through this program if I can find their home page. Well, I had it, anyway. Maybe it’s here. But they offer up a couple of products, or a couple of services, I want to say, that are really, really good services. I’m going to type in the HealthierGenerations.org. There it is right there. Let’s pull that up.
Yeah, this is the home page for the website, and what we wanted to do was kind of walk you through which screens, as it were, are really the important ones. We go to here to Eat to Live Healthier, and we click on Eat Healthier. In this Eat Healthier screen, as you can see, there’s a lot of information about making your diet better, but the things that really matter to us in the vending business are these two right here.
There’s product calculator and product navigator. The product calculator, if you click on that, will take you to this screen right here, and this screen is all about figuring out if your products actually meet the requirements for the school vending. It gives all kinds of different things, and it’s basically … It walks you through the things, and it’ll tell you if it works.
One of the other things that’s here on this website is the product navigator. What the product navigator does is it actually gives you lists of products that meet these requirements, so we click on that. We go down here to Smart Snacks, and of course, then you go back here to Snacks again, and it’ll give you a complete … Here’s a menu of items that it shows: bars, cereals, cookies, brownies, pastries, chips. If we just click on chips, it brings you up a whole bunch of things, and who makes them, and what the skews are, and all that kind of thing. This is a really tremendous website that you can use. It’s called HealthierGeneration.org. Really good one.
One of the other ones is, if you’re in the vending business, you already know about Vistar, but Vistar now has a whole series of products. As you can see on their home page, they have healthier snacks for a healthy life, and they have a whole section and a whole bunch of products dedicated to healthy vending, and getting you in the products that you need in school.
These are the kinds of things that we wanted to give to you out there so that y’all know what you’ve got coming up, because adding healthy products into your mix is going to be important as we go forward.
Tom, anything that you have to add?
Tom Shivers: That’s great stuff there, Larry. Now, we’ll have links to both of those resources below the video, so anything else we’re going to be talking about later?
Larry Towner: Well, we always have lots to talk about on the Vending Show, but we’re going to do, coming up is impending … Any of these impending events, we’re going to start doing a series on what we’re calling impending events. These aren’t necessarily doom and gloom things, but they’re things that are going to happen to you as you run your business, and we know, just because we’ve done this for a long time, there’s going to be certain things that we know we’re going to do.
We’re going to try to leave the seasons a little bit, which means we’re going to start into a fall program, because it’s dead of summer right now, but these things happen year after year after year at this time, so we’re going to do a series of events that are going to come up that you can do a little pre-planning for, get yourself prepared for it, and be ready to go. All of that’s going to come up in future Vending Shows.
Tom Shivers: Awesome. And of course, subscribe to get in on all these new shows that are coming, and you’ve been watching the Vending Business Show, a publication of A&M Equipment Sales.
Whether you are doing school vending or not, healthy vending is going to be an increasing part of your product mix in the future because customers are going to begin demanding it. So you need to begin preparing for it if you haven’t already.
Some of the challenges with vending in schoolsg are identifying products that meet the government requirements. Here are resources that will help in this area: We have AMS Healthy Vending Machines
Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros Episode Transcript:
Tom: Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros is a webinar coming up February 25th, and joining me to talk about it is Larry Tanner, who is a vending business consultant with Service Group, International. So, Larry, what’s this webinar gonna be about?
Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros Larry Tanner: Well, Tom, our goal in this webinar is to help you, or help our audience, to become better sales people in regards to vending, going out and getting new accounts, generating new accounts, and becoming more profitable.
Tom: Okay, and who’s gonna get the most from it? Who’s this webinar designed for?
Larry Tanner: This webinar is really designed for an owner/operator, but it could be designed for a sales manager as well. It’s designed for a guy that needs to go out and generate some accounts, wants to get profitable accounts, wants to learn a couple of new techniques, or maybe, quite a few new techniques, on how to generate leads, how to get good prospects, and how to actually close deals. So, that’s who’s gonna get the most out of it.
Tom: Okay, and what’s your background in the vending industry?
Larry Tanner: I’ve been in the vending business for about 35 years. I owned my own vending company for over 15, finished up with in excess of 500 thousand dollars a year in sales, and in three route guys, and we had about 110 or so accounts, 350 machines. Built that from the ground up, from zero. So, that’s my experience in the vending industry.
Tom: Okay, and who else is gonna be on the webinar?
Larry Tanner: We’re gonna have two other guests; Dan Jordan, who is a professional sales guy. He owns a staffing company right now, but he has been selling for almost all of his professional career. He does sales consulting as well, and we’re also gonna have Joe Nichols, president of A and M Equipment. And Joe is a very seasoned vending professional. He has been in the business for 40 plus years. Grew up in the business, basically, has run all aspects, and currently sells vending equipment.
Tom: Thanks, Larry. You can learn more about the webinar in Sales Success Secrets of Vending Pros, at amequipmentsales.com. And there should be a link to the registration page somewhere on this, around this video, either below it or somewhere around it. We’ve got room for a hundred people.
Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines The government requires all vending machines to comply with the new health codes which means calorie info must be displayed on the machine for each product before the sale. How are operators going to handle this requirement?
This is part of the healthcare reform act and the reason you need to vote.
AMS has a program to comply with this law, but their new firmware does more than just comply with this regulation. If you have older equipment you’ll need some way to do this. AMS has a retrofit for the Sensit 3 board which can be added to the machine, but if you have a Sensit 3 board, you simply need the new firmware in this way you will have Calorie info AMS Vending Machines.
Advantages:
1. Use your computer to input all the data into the firmware on an SD card and then load it on to each machine. This saves a lot of time.
2. You can load multiple planagrams into your machines – a fantastic resource with flexibility.
The initial cost is less than $50.
Going forward all A&M Equipment Sales refurbished AMS machines will have the Sensit 3 board installed. and will have Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Tom: All right, I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show here again with Larry Towner, who is a vending business consultant with which-
Larry Towner: Service Group International.
Tom: I am having a great show today, everybody.Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines So, thanks for being here Larry. We’re, we’re talking about the new calorie requirements for vending machines that have been coming, that are coming out. The government has basically said all vending machines have to comply with the health codes now and they are required to produce calorie counts for all products in the vending machine if, for vendors, vending operators have more than 20 or more machines. So how are operators going to handle this, do you think, Larry?
Larry Towner :Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines Well, let’s settle a couple of questions. First off, if you don’t have more than 20 vending machines, you’re really not in the vending business. You’re just kind of a hobbyist at best. So it’s really going to affect almost all the people that are in the vending business, in some form or another. I’m just gonna throw out this political statement. Folks, this is part of the healthcare reform act. This is the reason why you need to vote. If you, Tom and I were talking about it before the show, if you think that people are going to look at that display screen and say, “Wow, I was going to buy those Cheetos, but they’ve got 140 calories in it and I’ve decided I’m not going to buy them.” but you need to be well informed, so I guess there might be some things to do with it.
Larry Towner: What we’re going to talk about is we’re going to talk a little bit about one of the manufacturers, it’s AMS or Automatic Merchandising Systems Machines. They have come up with a very, very good program to comply with this law. One of the things that I want to just discuss is that the new firmware that they’re offering actually does more than just comply with this regulation, so we’ll get into it. A little bit is, Tom as you stated, that the government has required that we now have to put calorie counts on there before you make the selection on the machine. If you’ve got equipment out there, particularly older equipment, you’re going to have to come up with some kind of a system to do this.
Larry Towner: AMS has a system available now on their SENSIT 3 boards, which if you’re vending, you know about AMS and you know about the SENSIT boards. This is a retrofit to SENSIT that board that you can put on either a SENSIT 1 or a SENSIT 2 machine, but you can add the SENSIT 3 board to those machines. It’s of course going to cost you a little bit of money to do that. But if you’ve already got a SENSIT 3 board, what this is is this is a firmware update that will allow you to transfer your information to your machines via an SD card. The big advantages that I saw with this when I looked at this program was that you are able to make all of your, or input all of your data from your computer into the firmware program on an SD card and then you transport the SD card out to the machines.
Larry Towner: The real beauty of that is is that if you set your planograms up on your machines and if your planograms are all the same on all your machines, you can just walk up to that machine and in about a minute, you download the new firmware, including all your pricing and all your calorie information into each machine. The great advantage to that, if you know about reprogramming machines is is that in a minute you can do the whole machine and you can do multiple machines in the same amount of minute. In an older machine, I’ve spent a lot of my life in the older machines where you have to reprogram every single column every single time and it would take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to reprice, just to reprice the machine.
Larry Towner: So this is a tremendous resource for you to be able to go out and add a bunch of information onto your machines with just a very, very simple insert of the SD card and a download of your firmware onto that board. In talking to the people at AMS, you can load multiple planograms into your machine so you’re not limited to just one set. You can really, they say an unlimited number of planograms. I think you’re limited by the amount of the space you have on your SD card, but be that as it may, you can put a lot of planograms on a two gigabyte SD card.
Larry Towner: So the big advantage here is, I mean, even if it goes right down or if you want to just reprice your machines, you walk in, you plug that thing in, you set your prices in your office in your free time, and then you just go out and reprice all your machines. Wham bam, thank you ma’am and it’s done. Fantastic resource. Initial costs for an SD card in an adapter to plug it into your board is less than $100. In fact, it’s actually less than $50. So really, really good opportunity. Don’t have to do a whole lot of, don’t have to do any retrofitting, unless you’ve got a SENSIT 1 or SENSIT 2 board. But that’s the greatest advantage. Tom, do you have any questions on this program?
Tom: Well, I was going to ask you what it costs, but it sounds like it’s less than $50 per machine.
Larry Towner: No, it’s not per machine. I’m glad you asked that question. It’s not per machine. It’s you buy the adapter … It’s essentially an adapter cable and an SD card with the firmware on it. You buy that once, you change all your machines. So you’re amortizing that out over the cost of all the SENSIT 3 boards that you have out there in your rotation. So it’s not per machine, it’s a onetime fee.
Tom: I see. Well that’s great. So, that’s good. AMS’ all new machines obviously are going to have this. So that’s how you take care of the machines that don’t have it.
Larry Towner: Well, yeah. All the new AMS machines will have it. Now, Joe at A & A Equipment was telling me he will be retrofitting and anytime he does a refurb job on an AMS machine now, it’s going to have the SENSIT board installed in it. So when you’re looking at your refurbished equipment, just make sure to ask and say, “Does it have a sense at three board in it?” and you’ll be good to go.
Tom: Awesome. Anything else?
Larry Towner: Sounds like a fantastic program to me. It’s very simple to use. You can do it sitting at home on your computer, then you take it out. You can do multiple planograms, you can have … You can segment it by sit by season, by location, by however you want to do it. You can scroll through your various menu options on your on your SD board to see which planogram you actually want to put into that particular machine. So it gives you, really gives you ultimate flexibility and really … I mean, it really is not even a cost. It really is a very nominal costs. Essentially, the cost of an adapter cable and an SD card, which is it’s like 50 bucks. So what? If you’ve got 10 machines, that’s $5 a machine, piece of cake. Compared to some of the systems out there, that’s really, really, really a bargain.
Tom: Awesome. Alright, well thanks Larry. You’ve been watching Calorie Info Ams Vending Machines the Vending Business Show, a production of A & m Equipment Sales.
In this episode of the Vending Business Show, we interview Larry Towner, a successful vending operator, and vending business consultant. He shares valuable tips about healthy vending, .
Episode Transcript:
Tom Shivers: Hi. I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show and I’m here with Larry Towner, who is a vending business consultant, been in the vending business for a number of years and sold his business in 2012. Thanks for being here, Larry.
Larry Towner: How are you, Tom?
Tom Shivers: Good, good. Today, we’re talking about healthy vending. Earlier this year, Fresh Healthy Vending, which is a brand of vending company, had an IPO. It makes you wonder, wow, is healthy vending really hot now and if so, what does that mean?
Larry Towner: Well, healthy vending is a hot subject right now. There’s a lot of talk in the media about snack food. New York City just had that size restriction on sugary drinks and things like that. So the topic itself is very hot. The IPO that you’re seeing that came out is certainly an interesting development in the vending business. There are a number of public vending companies that are out there in the world and they are actually quite large corporations. The interest is that this particular company specializes in healthy vending alone. That’s what I find so intriguing. What’s your take on it, Tom?
Tom Shivers: Yeah. I think it is a … You hear about healthy snacks and healthy from the USDA and all these things coming down from the USDA lately affecting schools and things like that. I think that’s kind of … Vending in schools is almost game over really. You do it the government’s way or you don’t do it at all. I’m not sure what the solution is for school vending, but healthy vending I think is interesting and it can work in some places. I don’t know if it works everywhere though.
Larry Towner : Well, that’s always been kind of my position. In our companies, we always had a section of our machines that we dedicated to, I’m going to say healthier type snacks. I mean I’m kind of loving right now, I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but I have watched, and I have seen that Nature Valley granola bars is showing off how healthy their products are and things like that and how it’s nature and this and that. I kind of laugh because if you actually look at the packaging, it’s pretty much about the same as eating a Snickers candy bar from a total calorie intake and fat content and things like that. It just has products that are actually a little bit better.
In our machines, we always had a section of our machines that were dedicated to healthier type snacks. When I have approached the healthy vending side, one of the things about the so called companies that specialize in healthy vending is that once you’re into that particular subset of the market, you’re not going to be able to do anything without compromising the integrity of what your … because their whole machine is fronted with this healthy vending concept and all of that. So you go and put it what would be a traditional bag of potato chips or a traditional candy bar and people are going to kind of look at you like you’re a little bit strange.
We always kind of went in the reverse way. We promoted sections of the machines as being healthy or if somebody wanted a whole healthy machine, we just put in a regular vending machine with all healthy items in the machine. It’s easy enough to do because you’re just changing product selections out. You’re not actually changing out the fronts of machines.
Fortunately, we all work with A&M Equipment and if you do want your machines fronted with healthy vending selections, Joe at A&M Equipment Sales will front your machines however you like them. So you don’t need to get tied up into a big franchise agreement or into anything like that. You can go out and compete with the so called healthy vending companies and present machines that offer up healthy selections at a fraction of the cost. That’s really the only difference I see is that vending is vending is vending. If someone puts money or slides a credit card in and a machine pushes the product out, at the end of the day, that’s what vending is.
Tom Shivers: Very well said. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about your business and what you do.
Larry Towner: Well, my business, I’m in the consulting business. Like I said, we were in the vending business since the mid-80s and it makes me feel old. Been in the vending business since the mid-80s. We sold off our vending operation in 2012. We took up the marketing side. We help companies solve their vending problems, particularly smaller operators that need help in sales and marketing and operations and things like that. We help to make people more efficient so that they can make more money, help them with their maintenance issues. Across the board, we’ve done it all. We are available at ServiceGroupInternational.com and send us an email and we’ll get back with you.
Tom Shivers: You’ve been watching the Vending Business Show,on our topic Healthy Vending a publication of A&M Equipment Sales.
Biggest Freakin’ Vending Machines check out these videos below and view the Biggest Freakin’ Vending Machines in the Word!
Vending machines have become commonplace in our lives, and where would we be without them? From candy vending machines to soda vending machines and everything in between we truly are spoiled for choice.
Taking a trip around the world, maybe even your own country will reveal a wide variety of machines of all shapes and colors. Anyway, enough introduction let’s get stuck in shall we?
The following are in no particular order and we apologize in advance for the apparent lunacy of some of them. We did enclose the adjective interesting in speech marks so consider that a caveat of sorts. The first entry certainly is, as for the others we’ll leave that “in the eye of the beholder”. A lot is included for the unique contents they dispense, you’ll see what we mean. Enjoy.
Our vending consultants are happy to answer any questions or concerns you may have. Call 770-482-7993 or Email one of our consultants at: [email protected]
