Can you ‘Eat Fresh’ from a vending machine?
Subway believes you can, and to that end, the sandwich franchiser has begun to roll out a new line of smart fridges in the US to sell premade Subway sandwiches. The new fridges feature “artificial intelligence and natural language processing” and are restocked daily with sandwiches from local franchisees. The new line of vending machines is a part of the company’s growing focus on non-traditional formats to target “on-the-go” customers.
The first smart fridge from Subway showed up this September at the University of California San Diego. According to the company, the initial feedback has been strong among franchises to install the new fridges near their stores.
While the UC San Diego fridge was the first Subway vending machine to show up in the states, the company began experimenting with vending machines last year in Singapore. The Singapore machines were also supported by Grab & Go but looked a little closer to a traditional vending machine than the newly introduced smart fridges.
In an interview with QSR Magazine, Subway’s senior VP of development Steven Rafferty said the franchisees drove the push into unattended retail solutions.
“The partner says, ‘Hey, how can we maximize our sales even in the hours when we’re not open?’” Rafferty said. “We had some success with limited trials of this in international markets, in some Asian markets specifically. But closer to home, as I said, travel plaza partners have really latched on to this and it’s really meeting the needs of our customers who are our franchisees who in turn want to meet the needs of our consumers.”
I like the idea of the Subway machines and could see them finding traction, especially in public spaces where no fresh options are available. I’d like to see the new machines offer non-sub menu options like their non-bread bowls, which could provide customers with a nice option beyond carb-heavy sandwiches.
While Subway doesn’t mention hardware partners in their announcement, I’d be surprised if they didn’t work with a technology partner to develop the fridges. If one of our Spoon readers knows who Subway may have worked with to build their fridge, drop us a line and let us know.
According to Subway, their new smart fridges will begin appearing at college campuses, airports, and hospitals. Interestingly, the company’s announcement emphasized Subway’s focus on exploring non-traditional formats, including ghost kitchens. If the unattended business begins to take off, I could see how some franchisee partners may forgo the traditional store format and build ghost kitchens to support a network of unattended offerings in their market.
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