A company that makes mobile concessions carts is seeking to expand with a mobile vending machine trailer designed to dispense fresh grocery items.
“With COVID-19, there’s a huge need to take products to the customer now,” Annette Nolan, founder and CEO of Carts Blanche, which makes a variety of kiosks and carts for use at street fairs, work sites, and other venues, told Specialty Food News. “People are interested in self-service.”
The Mobile, Ala.-based company has been in discussions with a handful of potential buyers interested in Carts Blanche’s VendaMart trailer that can accommodate up to nine refrigerated and/or frozen-food vending machines. The VendaMart concept allows consumers to shop for a variety of produce items, such as individually wrapped heads of lettuce or trays of apples, for example.
Carts Blanche’s latest initiative follows decades of work in the mobile concessions and vending business. The company has made carts and kiosks for multinational brands such as Nestlé, Disney, and Aramark, as well as for small entrepreneurs.
Over the years, the company has implemented several innovations, including concessions trailers that accommodate ATMs and digital signage. The company’s mobile kiosk systems can run on line power or generators, and equipment is configured so that it can be monitored remotely.
A mobile trailer with vending machines that sell fresh produce and other food items marks new territory for the company, however.
“Anything that can be packaged can be vended,” said Nolan.
The entrepreneurs that Nolan is currently in discussions with for the rollout of the VendaMarts system are considering two different models for their use. One would leave the VendaMart trailer in one place, while the other would move it to different locations multiple times each day.
Nolan said she sees VendaMarts as a potential vehicle for food retailers to expand their own reach, in addition to providing business opportunities for entrepreneurs, particularly during the pandemic when access to groceries in low-income areas has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Mobile grocery efforts have sprung up in various markets around the country in recent years, often as a means of providing access to fresh groceries in food deserts. They have taken the form of retrofitted buses, shipping containers, 18-wheelers, and pushcarts, among other mobile retail structures. Most of these have featured open displays of grocery items, however, as opposed to the vending machines featured in the VendaMarts concept.
Examples have included the Twin Cities Mobile Market in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Fresh Moves in Chicago, Stock Box in Seattle, and Green Carts in New York City.
A report from EcoDistricts, which supports the expansion of economic development, nutrition, and sustainability in cities, noted that mobile grocery units can be more effective to deploy than storefronts, “thanks to lower barriers to entry and lower costs to maintain, retrofit, and operate.”
In addition to providing access to nutritious foods for low-income families, mobile grocery units can provide several economic benefits to communities, the EcoDistrict report found, including:
- Reduced time and money spent traveling to more distant grocery stores to purchase food;
- When mobile grocery units are run by local organizations or community members, they help circulate revenue within the local economy; and
- Providing healthy food in low-income neighborhoods can be correlated with lower spending on health-related expenses.
Some of the barriers to entry for mobile grocery, however, include restrictive zoning ordinances, availability of start-up capital, and potential political pressure from competing retail businesses.
Related: Half of Consumers Shop Both Brick-and-Mortar and Online; Nontraditional Formats Find New Niches During Pandemic.
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