Secondly, you can be pretty sure that tripping over a drain and accidentally hurling your luggage at an elderly group of tourists is going to get you shouted at, and thirdly, Paris’ international vending show is brimming with a huge range of innovations and enthusiastic individuals!
My first visit to the exhibition began with a trip to device management brand Cumulocity’s stand. While there, I conducted an interview with the company’s very helpful head of business development Philip Hooker, who explained Cumulocity’s new Device Cloud in great detail and highlighted the benefits it can bring to the vending industry via Paypal systems and smartphone technology.
After my chat with Philip, I sat in on the International Business Day Conference hosted by European Vending Association director general of regulatory affairs Erwin Wetzel, which focused on the latest trends in the European vending industry.
Directors of several national vending associations, including Germany’s BDV, France’s NASVA, Russia’s RNVA and the UK’s AVA, took to the stage to comment on their specific sector findings, with a variety of interesting facts surfacing at the forum.
Germany’s vending industry, for example, is dominated by the business market as opposed to the residential consumer market, and is currently experiencing a drive for healthier vending solutions. A future trend of outdoor vending in countrysides and suburbs is also likely to emerge in the next few years, selling an array of household items such as milk and eggs.
In France, which is the second largest overall vending market in Europe with 16 million food and drink products sold in vending machines every day, 70% of French customers eat a snack once a day and 50% are regular snack consumers (according to research by Etude quanti). Apparently, 70% of consumers are in work and 53% are women. Currently, between the hours of 3-6pm, the highest number of items sold are chocolate bars, though there is a growing demand for healthier snacks in this region too.
Compared to Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the UK, Russia is the only country where ‘glass-front machines’ have overtaken ‘free-standing hot machines’ in terms of sales. Prices in Russian vending machines tend to be higher than in supermarkets, however, which could go some way towards explaining the relatively low numbers of vending consumers in Russia compared to its European peers.
Online telemetry and cashless vending is becoming more and more popular in this part of the world, which could potentially see a increase in popularity.
Jonathan Hidler of the Automatic Vending Association (AVA) said that the vending association in the UK was currently in the middle of a health debate. He claimed that specifiers wanted to see more healthy products in vending machines, but they also want to see a healthy profit return. In reality, healthy snacks just aren’t as popular as regular snack food items right now, and are usually more expensive anyway. Perhaps a drop in price and a shift in marketing would alleviate this problem in the future, but it currently looks set to stay that way as things stand.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024