drinks vending...

Obviously the type of equipment you will need will largely depend on the number of people the machine will need to cater for, or indeed, the amount of use the machine will get. We’ll start at the smaller end of the market. By the smaller end we are talking of sites with up to 25 staff.

The smallest type of drink machines can loosely be defined as tabletop machines. In other words they are not free standing machines, and can either sit on a work surface, or some have their own base cabinet.

There are several different kinds of machines in this category, filter coffee machines, in-cup machines, “sachet” or “closed- system” machines, manual dispensers, semi-automatic machines and some smaller fully automatic machines. Not so long ago the filter coffee machine, in cup machine and manual dispenser dominated the tabletop market.

A significant increase in the number of small businesses has increased the demand for small machines of late. Several machine manufacturers who had previously shown no real interest in tabletop machines have now enthusiastically entered the market. Recent advances in technology have led to the introduction of of low-priced semi- and even some fully automatic machines. These machines which represent excellent value for money are beginning to make a real impact. Lets look at some of the different options available in tabletop machines.

I’ll give you a brief description of what it is they do, and then some indication of the strengths (yes, they all have their strengths) and their weaknesses (and, yes, they all have their weaknesses!). At then end of each section I’ll give you a quick reference reminder of the Plusses and Minuses.

vendingabc is from cafe azzurro limited