Not just water, coffee, snacks: everything can be sold with a vending machine.
This was the intuition of Antonio Adriani, who in 1967 founded FAS in Schio, Vicenza with his brother Santino: a company born with the construction, by hand, of the first prototype of vending machine based on its own patent which provided for various drums moved by a single motor and various clutches: from here a path of growth and innovation started which today sees the European leader in the vending sector, without ever having stopped innovating.
The last frontier is to rethink the “old” vending machines with intelligent software capable of making them a multi-service and digital marketing platform. Thus, the 4.0 distribution revolution also passes through village shops and opens up new scenarios for micro-entrepreneurs.
The pilot case
The pilot case is that of the butcher shop “La sartoria della carne”, a family-run shop in the heart of Malo (Vicenza), a town of about 15,000 inhabitants which today can be defined as the first meat boutique in Italy to have accepted the challenge of digital in the fresh produce sector.
Denis Deganello’s intuition was to rethink the meat booking and collection service to meet customer needs and make it active all year round at any time, by installing a zero kilometer vending machine with high refrigeration and preservation of products, especially very fresh ones such as meat, eggs and dairy products. A project developed by FAS International launched in 2020, when it proposed to Denis Deganello to install a refrigerated vending machine for meat, to be used as a 24-hour point of sale, even when the shop is closed. A highly innovative project for a provincial company that has always worked by word of mouth and contact with the customer.
The results
In just a few weeks from installation, the Deganello butcher’s distributor already has 360 subscribers to the booking and collection service, through the dedicated app, with 124 orders placed for a total of over 2,000 euros in sales of cuts, side dishes, hamburgers and premium rib. The integrated system that connects the vending machine service to the proprietary app developed by FAS allows product availability to be checked from a smartphone, tablet or PC, even when the shop is closed, and all the features are listed in the digital menu to guarantee quality, such as maturation, seasoning and expiry date. Once registered on the app and made the reservation, even through the QR code present at the distributor, the collection can take place during the day or, in the event of non-collection, the system imposes a time-out which makes the product available on the app and activate the customer refund procedure.