‘It’s Time To Deliver Thoroughly Modern Vending to the NHS’, says SnackTime’s Steve Hartland, (pictured) in the first of his regular blog posts for Planet Vending
Hello, Steve Hartland here. How are you doing?
I’d like to share some thoughts on vending in the NHS with you and I’d welcome your feedback.
In my view, vending in the NHS is represented by an uncoordinated hotch-potch of random solutions, varying from an ‘any machine will do’ approach, (combined with minimal product compliance, more often than not); to a more precise offering, which includes new equipment but which is governed by planograms, driven by the demands of the NHS, which reflect a desire to provide consumers with prescribed ‘healthier options’.
In other words, we’re talking ‘forced compliance’ when it comes to vending in the NHS: the use of a stick, where a carrot might easily have done a better job…
The NHS is desperate to get the product mix right, and no wonder: vending is (or, in some sad cases, ‘was’) a valuable source of income for them and it’s difficult to make the numbers add up, when you’re offering products to the public that you think they should have, rather than those that sales figures tell us they’d choose for themselves…
So, then what happens? Sales decline and that leaves the vending operator in a quandary, facing questions such as ‘how do we reduce our investment?’ and ‘what’s the maximum we can part with as a rebate?’ In other words, ‘I’m a vending operator, get me outta here!’
Consumers are much more savvy than most of us imagine: they take one look at obsolete technology and they think, ‘you’re having a laugh!’ and walk away.
It’s a case of ‘ever decreasing circles’: declining volumes spell an end to investment. Pretty soon, the machines on site are elderly, out of date and completely uninspiring. Worse, their age makes them unreliable and increasingly liable to breaking down. They eat-up field engineers’ time like caterpillars on a leaf and that’s not all: customers have become accustomed to using machines that interact like iPads, (other tablet computers are available), to deliver a thoroughly modern vending service that’s incredibly efficient and great fun to use.
Consumers are much more savvy than most of us imagine: they take one look at obsolete technology and they think, ‘you’re having a laugh!’ and walk away.
It’s frustrating that so many NHS Trusts find themselves up effluent creek without an oar: they’re stuck with an outdated vending offer that people will turn to only in extremis. At these neglected sites, the vending offer been reduced to the level of an old arcade one-armed bandit: you need a lot of luck to hit the jackpot. (If you’re not old enough to remember, you had to go through a lot of apples and bananas to have any chance of landing the coveted three cherries…)
(All of which makes me sound like Eric Cantona going on about seagulls, but I think you know what I mean…)
At SnackTime, we reckon ‘enough is enough’. What’s done is done, history can’t be changed, and all that. So instead of wringing our hands about ‘what it is’, and ‘what it was’, we decided to concentrate on ‘what it shall be’. We started thinking: ‘what could we accomplish with the vending opportunities on this site, (given the benefit of some smart investment) and how we can we drive this forward to deliver within the life of the contract?’
The first opportunity to apply our forward thinking came with Northampton & Kettering NHS Trust. Consisting of the vending at both Northampton General Hospital and Kettering General Hospital, the tender was for a nice, sizeable business, with great potential for re-development. Accordingly, we proposed state-of-the-art technology, contactless payment; strong brand influences, advanced telemetry and our own, unique ‘Foodbox Long.’
By the way, in case you haven’t heard of it yet, Foodbox Long allows us to deliver a greater variety of produce, designed to comply with the NHS Trust’s imperatives without depriving customers of their favourite, best-selling’ brands.
We were delighted when the client decided to go with our recommendations.
Now we’re a few months in to the contract, we can see clearly that vending is no longer losing quite so much to the competition… (Which is usually an ‘open all hours’ corner shop across the road, where people can easily stock-up on ‘contraband’ ahead of their hospital visit).
So, we’re pretty happy with the way things are turning out but, better still, so is our client. Sales volumes are up and expectations are high for the future.
When the deal was done, I was reminded of a story I read on here on Planet Vending, in which Mark Stone, (SnackTime CEO), was quoted as saying: ‘technology will be the key to our journey’ and I’ll tell you what, he’s got that spot on…
That’s it from me for now. Thanks for reading my (new) blog, please let me know what you thought of it, so long as you liked it. Otherwise, smile and just walk away! Only joking, your feedback would be very welcome, be it positive or negative. So, until next time, ask not what you can do for your company, but what your company can do for the consumer…
*Steve Hartland is Head of Group Sales for SnackTime.
