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Providing vending services to factories can be incredibly rewarding. Most of these accounts are HUGE, and you’ll be improving the workplace for people who help provide an important service.
However, because of the size and demographic of these accounts, there are some important things to keep in mind.
In this article, we’re going to cover them.
Working at a factory means being in the presence of heavy machinery. As a result, safety gear is a must have in order to provide vending services at these locations. Not only will it reduce the risk of potential injuries, but many managers and supervisors won’t even let you access the machines without them.
The type of safety equipment you’ll need in order to be on-site is going to vary from location to location; however, every location we’ve personally visited has required safety shoes at the bare minimum.
Some other safety gear you might need include:
Some factories might even enforce a certain dress code. One of our locations was at a factory that made paper cups and asked all of its employees to wear hair caps to prevent hair from potentially getting into a cup. As a result, we would wear either a hair cap or a hat whenever we visited this factory to service our vending machines there.
You can find most of this equipment at a store like Home Depot or Uline.
Certain factories might ask you to work-related supplies into your vending machines. Many of these will be some form of safety gear, while others might be even more work-specific equipment such as blades and screws. Depending on how work-specific the supplies are, you might be able to get them to buy these for you, in which case you would have to workout a fair price.
Even if the factory owners never ask, you should still consider putting supplies in your vending machines if you can anyway. It’s a good gesture and the workplace will appreciate your business for it.
Some examples of supplies you can put into your machines include:
Most of these fit into a snack machine fairly easily.
Factories are full of heavy machinery. As a result, they use massive amounts of electricity. This can lead to power surges from time to time that can potentially damage your vending machines.
At Lucky Vending, we have personally had this happen. An electrical surge at a factory resulted in our machines in the breakroom being overloaded. This ended up destroying the motherboard on one of the snack machines and we had to replace it as a result.
We don’t want you to go through what we went through. So we highly recommend using Surge Protectors for all of your vending machines, particularly in factory settings.
A particularly great thing about factories as vending machine locations is that the workers tend to use the machines pretty frequently. Expect to restock a lot of products whenever you make a visit at one of these locations.
Because of the frequent usage however, be prepared to deal with a lot of comments and complaints. If they experienced a problem with one of your products or vending machines, they’ll make sure you know. They’ll also be ready to make suggestions about what they think should be in the machines, and sometimes it will be things that are not possible. We’ve once had a worker suggest we put frozen pizzas in the snack machine.
Some things you can do to best prepare for this:
Commission is a percentage of your profit that you pay back to the factory owner. Not every location will ask for this, but the biggest ones will usually ask you for a percentage.
In the vending machine business, ‘Rent’ often refers to your part of the electrical bill. It’s no secret that vending machines use quite a bit of electricity, and leaving them constantly running can be a significant expense to some companies.
Both of these are things you need to be ready to negotiate with owners about. Work out something that’s fair to both you and the owner. The owner should not be stuck with a massive electricity bill, but they should also not be taking a significant portion of your profit.
Also, this is important:
When discussing commission payments, make sure you’re agreeing with the owner on a portion of your NET PROFIT. Do NOT cut into your gross profit. If you don’t gross enough on a monthly basis, you’ll end up LOSING money after product, gas, and service expenses are accounted for.
We hope this article helps with servicing factory locations in your vending machine business.
Thanks for reading!
For more tips and guides on the vending machine business, visit our blog.
If you’re a factory, a manufacturing plant, or anything in between from Toronto or the GTA and would like a premium vendor to look after your breakroom, click here to contact us.