Healthy Drinking

In an increasingly health-conscious society, people have more and more information about choosing kinds of food and drink which will help them remain healthy. This kind of decision becomes all the more important when people are on the move, or at work, or away from shops or other sources of refreshment, mainly because there’s very little time to decide what you want, and what will do the trick from the relatively limited choice available.

This process becomes even more important when designing vending machines as these are often the very last resort we’ll choose when trying to find food or drink – not because they’re unhealthy, nor because they’re worse than what’s available in supermarkets or shops, but because scientific study shows that we associate vending machines with convenience primarily, quality second, choice third. In other words, when you haven’t time or you’re not in the right place to choose what you’d most like to eat or drink, this is when you go to the vending machine.

So to come back to the question of healthy choices, a number of vending machines – companies are now looking seriously at providing their potential customers with choices that reflect the informed desires of a health-conscious society. Hence while you’ll see just as many Coke machines out there, and just as many machines selling sweets, savoury snacks and other what might be termed ‘unhealthy’ foods and beverages, there are a lot more vending manufacturers conceiving health-conscious machines.

Some are offering products in a machine that sells a combination of healthy and ‘unhealthy’ products. Some are offering stand-alone machines that only vend products promoting a healthy alternative to traditional snacking and drinking. Some of these kinds of products will be low in fat, low in added sugar or salt and wherever possible will not contain E numbers.

Others are offering specific products designed to complement their existing ranges – so that when you come across a vending machine -which you would ordinarily expect to sell standard coffees and teas, you’ll be able to buy lemon tea, which can contain up to 50% of your daily vitamin C – handy for keeping swine flu at bay. Then there are cranberry juice drinks, which are refreshing and packed full of vitamin C and antioxidants. Similiarly, flavoured water with fewer than 10 calories per drink is also becoming a very popular choice among major vending manufacturers. And market leaders in water filtration are coming on board too, offering clean, clear filtered water as a built-in element in vending machines so that you don’t need to double up on drinks fountains. The next step is to make the new, healthy vending culture more energy efficient – the subject of future debate, no doubt…