If you have spent any time traveling in the U.S. over the past 10 years, you may have noticed a curious vending machine filled with jars. Instead of crinkle-cut chips or wired earbuds for that movie you want to watch on the plane, these vending machines sell freshly made apple pecan salads, blueberry chia overnight oats, and mediterranean bowls. They are run by a company called Farmer’s Fridge, and they are slowly taking over airports in the U.S.
Since it launched in 2013, the company has installed its vending machines at about 20 U.S. airports, including LAX, Chicago O’Hare, Dallas Fort-Worth, and most recently, Las Vegas. (I first stumbled on its leafy offerings at JFK airport, while on a quest for a meal that didn’t involve a side of soggy fries.)
And it’s not just airports. These fridges are cropping up everywhere, from hospitals like New York Presbyterian and Boston Medical Center, to Amazon fulfillment centers, college campuses like Northwestern and Harvard, and stadiums like L.A’s Crypto.com Arena. Today, the company counts 1,600 locations around the country, and in the next 10 years, CEO and founder Luke Saunders is hoping to reach 100,000. How? With an understanding of cold chain logistics, an ever-expanding menu, and a swanky new fridge.
This month, the company is debuting a new design that could help the company roll out more fridges at a faster clip. Five years in the works, the new fridge comes with a pitched roof that stands out from its flat-topped competitors. It boasts a new UX where various parts of the machine (from the payment module to the recycling bin where you can return your jar) light up to guide you through your purchase. And perhaps most importantly—at least when it comes to business growth—it is made of two flat-pack modules that can be assembled in just 30 minutes, compared to four hours for the previous model.
For now, the team is rolling these out at new locations only—the first 50 fridges are already on the ground in Chicago and New York. But if these fridges prove as efficient as hoped, the company will begin swapping them out, one airport at a time. “As we look to expand into new markets, our strategy is always to start with the airport,” Saunders told me. “Once we have the airport locked in, we build out the market with other verticals to saturate the market.”
The vending machine boom
Lipstick, guacamole, earrings: You can buy pretty much anything out of a vending machine today (especially in Japan.) But in the early 2010s, when Farmer’s Fridge was just a seed in Saunders’s mind, vending machines in the U.S. were only beginning to diversify. Best Buy launched its first airport vending machine in 2008. Sephora launched its in 2009. Benefit followed suit in 2013 with their now-iconic kiosk designed to look like a pink bus.
Saunders’s biggest influence, however, was Redbox, the now-defunct movie rental kiosk company. That, and ATMs, he says with a laugh. “Prior to [ATMs], you had to go into a bank, talk to somebody, wait in line, and now you could go anytime you wanted,” he says. ATMs, like vending machines, were convenient, and they were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Why has no one done this for food?” he wondered.
At the time, most vending machines sold snacks with a disturbingly long shelf life. The reasons for that are obvious. When food doesn’t need to be refrigerated, the level of urgency to get it from the facility where it’s made and into people’s mouths is significantly lower than when it’s fresh. A granola bar, for example, can take anywhere from two weeks to six months to make it into a vending machine. A salad from Farmer’s Fridge can only spend 24 to 48 hours in transit. After that, Saunder says, “the fridge won’t let you buy it.”
Farmer’s Food makes every meal in-house, from a 100,000 square-foot facility in Chicago. The workday begins at 4 a.m. with washing and chopping veggies, cooking pasta, and mixing dressings. The assembly line begins at 8 a.m., and by 6 p.m., the company has to decide where these meals will be shipped off to.
The team makes this decision based on a cost-function algorithm that Saunders himself built in the early days to calculate the probability the company will sell an item against the profitability of that item. The algorithm takes into consideration purchasing data, historical foot traffic data, and other variables like the weather.
Today, the software mostly gets it right, but that wasn’t always the case. Ten years ago, Saunders says about 50% of meals were left unsold. Now, that number has dropped to 5%. (Unsold meals get either donated or composted, depending on the location.)
From salads to . . . sushi?
From the beginning, Saunders suspected that the biggest hurdle to scaling wouldn’t be a lack of interest, but a lack of infrastructure. To prove out his theory, he set out to find a pilot location and eventually installed his first Farmer’s Fridge in a food court in Chicago. As Saunders recalls it, the food court was desperate for a tenant, and he himself was desperate for a landlord.
The food court ended up shuttering soon after that, but the machine had done its job, and interest snowballed from there. In the first year, the company made about $350,000. This year, Saunders says it is projected to make 30 to 40 times that, which could amount to as much as $140 million.
To date, the company’s best-selling item is the chicken southwest salad. In 2018, the company introduced sandwiches (and won a packaging award in the process). This year, they are rolling out protein bowls—and even contemplating sushi.
The idea of eating raw fish from an airport machine might put some people off, but Saunders is convinced the idea has merit. And it’s not just intuition. Every time people buy something from Farmer’s Fridge, they are asked to fill out to a survey with their wish list. The most requested item? You guessed it.
Sushi in a vending machine is not an entirely new concept. Japan has them in troves. But for Americans to buy in will likely depend on a variety of factors, including how much confidence the fridge can inspire. “People get nervous about stuff like that, and I’m the guy who’s like, ten years ago, people were telling me that about salad,” says Saunders. “If you make good sushi, people will buy it. If it’s bad, they won’t buy it.”
That the company spent five years fine-tuning the design of its fridges suddenly makes sense considering every fridge bears the burden of luring customers. Back in 2013, the first fridge looked as if “a vending machine and a restaurant had a baby,” says Saunders. It came with wood paneling, fresh plants on the roof and astroturf. Now, the company has pared down the aesthetic in favor of something “clean and bright.” The plants are gone. The wood paneling has made way for powdered-coated metal.
But what the company has lost in rustic charm, it’s hoping to make up for in brand trust. This new design might not win any awards for hygge design—but it acknowledges that the fridge is just a shell, and the actual star is what’s inside it. Whether it comes with a side of soy sauce, or not.
