July 31, 2010

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Junk Food: It’s To Die For!

July 30, 2010 By Patrick Sanders Leave a Comment

If you asked the average person what the biggest threat is to their country, their family, or their community, what do you think they’d say? Pollution? Economic conditions? Crime? I say nay, good citizen. Your enemy is the insidious JUNK FOOD that lurks in your pantry, your convenience store, and your vending machines.

The junk food industry probably has some nice people in it.  But they are definitely doing some not nice things.  Let’s air their dirty laundry now!

  1. The junk food industry deliberately targets kids as young as two years old in order to create brand preference and lifelong loyalty.
  2. Fast food chains lure kids with free toys in their meals to get their parents to spend.
  3. Flavorings and colorings can cause rashes, asthma, and hyperactivity.
  4. Many children now prefer man-made flavors over real food!
  5. The average kid in the U.S. sees 25 hours of TV, which equates to 20,000 junk food ads a year! That’s a lot of brainwashing…
  6. 20% of kids under the age of two are given soft drinks by their parents! When my nephew was two, he did not need Mountain Dew. He needed to be shot with a tranquilizer dart.
  7. The average can of cola has 10 teaspoons of sugar. Picture that.
  8. Over 90% of children eat McDonalds at least once per month.
  9. American teenagers drink, on average, over 760 cans of soda per year!

Drum roll please……

And the TENTH junk food fact that is off-the-wall-ridiculous:

10.  The average person day consumes more sugar in TWO WEEKS than a person a century ago would consume in a whole YEAR.

I know. I know. It blew my mind as well.  Somehow people 100 years ago still survived their workday without draining over TWO cans (20 teaspoons, as we now know) of sugary crap drink.

Now that I’ve opened your eyes to the deadly advertising all around you and your children, I bet you’re going to retreat into the wilderness to hide.  Fear not! We can counter this marketing movement of junk food advertising and consumption with responsible eating habits and educating kids to not believe the stupid commercials they see.

Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, H.U.M.A.N., Happenings, Health & Nutrition, Philosophies & Beliefs, The Bigger Picture

Vending Machines and Socially Responsible Business

July 29, 2010 By Patrick Sanders Leave a Comment

You might be asking “What the heck to vending machines have to do with socially responsible business?” My answer: everything. Vending machines play a key role in food distribution in our country, and food is obviously an essential part of life.  That brown box down the hall from you in the break room holds more power than you think, for better or for worse….

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.
Albert Einstein

I don’t bust out Albert Einstein quotes lightly.  I only use them when I really need to drive a point home, and that point is this: everything you do as a company, down to the smallest choices you make, has an impact.  Its often the little things that get overlooked, too.  For example, how many companies out there claim to be socially responsible and yet still only provide their employees with unhealthy snack and drink options from vending machines that also have a huge carbon footprint?  While these companies may be socially responsible on a large scale, what about the health of its employees and the health of the planet?

I know what you’re thinking: “Is this guy serious? Vending machines? We have bigger fish to fry!” Well, what I’m saying is how are you going to expect your employees to perform at their peak when they are putting crap in their bodies throughout the workday? And how can you really say you’re a “green” company when you won’t replace your traditional, energy-sucking vending machines with modern eco-friendly vending machines stocked with health food?

Let me hit you with hard numbers if you’re still not convinced:

A study led by University of Cincinnati on obesity’s effects on productivity on 341 manufacturing workers indicated that health-related losses in productivity were 4.2% for moderate to obese workers, costing the company $1,800 per year in absenteeism related costs!

So let’s say your company is made up of the average distribution of people in the U.S. (30% obese).  If you have 1,000 employees then 300 are obese.  300 x $1,800 = $540,000 per year.

That’s half a million greenbacks!

While you can’t be responsible for the lifestyle decisions your employees make, the least you could do is provide them with healthy snack options while they work.


Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, Health & Nutrition, Healthy Vending Machines, Philosophies & Beliefs, THE VENDING INDUSTRY, The Bigger Picture, Vending Trends

Health Club Membership Tips: 5 Simple Ways to Get More Members

June 1, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

Health Club Membership Tips: 5 Simple Ways to Get More Members from Andy Mackensen on Vimeo.

Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, Entrepreneurship, Philosophies & Beliefs, Vending Tips & Tricks

Tackling Childhood Obesity

March 16, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

H.U.M.A.N. Healthy Vending is tacking childhood obesity one healthy vending machine at a time. Educating kids through streaming video display and making it more convenient to eat healthy are two of our main objectives as a company.

H.U.M.A.N. also likes to recognize other “humanists” of the world, like Jamie Oliver. This guy is reaching people in a big way! His television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, premiers on ABC on Friday March 26th. This show will educate people around the world (especially American’s) about the importance of healthy eating/living, and the current epidemic that we have created through consuming to many processed and sugary foods. Get ready for the awakening, because it is coming to mainstream television in a couple of weeks!

Filed Under: Health & Nutrition, Lifestyle, Philosophies & Beliefs, The Bigger Picture

Why Partnering With H.U.M.A.N. Makes Sense

February 22, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

Aside from our amazing machines and unparalleled customer service, here is the #1 reason you should partner with HUMAN Healthy Vending when you start your own healthy vending business:

In vending, it’s all about finding the best locations. LOCATIONS, LOCATIONS, LOCATIONS!

Premium locations with high traffic is what any vending machine owner strives for. We at HUMAN could keep our strategies a secret, but we like our operators and potential operators to be fully informed.  Check out our 6-Step premium location acquisition process:

Step 1 – 4 stage direct mail campaign to the top 250 locations in your region
Step 2 – 4 to 6 Weeks of Telemarketing to every single healthy vending conducive location in your region that meets our criteria (at least 20 vends per day)
Step 3 – 1 week of in-person location discovery & acquisition training with a HUMAN location pro
Step 4 – A HUMAN location pro attends 30-40 top-tier meetings over the course of a week
Step 5 – Custom press release and media outreach to every newspaper, tv and radio outlet
Step 6 - Constant follow-up marketing and outreach to EVERY location in your region for the lifetime of your partnership

With Step #3, this is all about the “Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime.”  We’re training you to be successful in the short and long-run!  Which brings me to my next point, #6.  We perform continual follow-up marketing for the lifetime of our partnership to ALL of the locations in your region.  We have a custom email and customer marketing solution that helps us with this.  Additionally, as our brand grows nationally and internationally, you’ll benefit from our success.  Everyone who comes to HUMAN is passed along to you.  And as our brand grows to tens of thousands of machines, it’s very, very good for you.

Here is a sneak peak of The Media Mogul! My next post will highlight the features of this unbelievable automated retailer/digital media money maker!!!!

Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, Entrepreneurship, Happenings, Healthy Vending Guidelines, Philosophies & Beliefs, The Bigger Picture, Vending Tips & Tricks

Childhood Obesity And The 2010 TED Prize Winner

February 18, 2010 By John Pinto 1 Comment

The TED Prize is awarded to an exceptional individual who receives $100,000 and, much more important, “One Wish to Change the World.”

Congratulations Jamie Oliver – 2010 TED Prize Winner

Jamie Oliver’s Wish: “I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

H.U.M.A.N. Healthy Vending supports this movement by actively placing 100% healthy snack and drink vending machines across the world! Our interactive network of healthy vending machines have streaming LCD screens that display nutritional facts, offer healthy eating tips, and promote healthy products that are not only healthy but taste great!

Check out his presentation at the TED Awards….

Filed Under: Health & Nutrition, Lifestyle, Philosophies & Beliefs, The Bigger Picture

H.U.M.A.N.: Creating Healthy Vending Success Part II

February 12, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

Why We Succeed at Schools While Traditional vending Companies Fail Part II

Products that are Actually Healthy AND Taste Good

When a healthy vending program fails to reach optimal success, it almost always has to do something with the products. The products must taste good and they cannot taste that much different than what students are used to. You can’t just change students’ taste preferences on the flip of a dime. Therefore, you must work with them. Take what products students like, find healthy items that taste similar, and offer those products to the students. Healthy snacks don’t have to taste like cardboard, and they shouldn’t!

Healthy products have made a huge stride over the past five to ten ears when it comes to taste. The problem is that many of the best products are not available via standard vending machine product distributors. A vending operator needs to build a network of new suppliers and distributors with different rules, policies, and prices, and many time they’re not willing to do that. HUMAN has never been involved with anything other than healthy vending. Therefore, our suppliers and our network is dialed-in to allow for the distribution of the healthiest, tastiest products that students love. We know what students like, and what they don’t, and that’s the foundation of our program.

With over six years of taste-test research (and many, many mistakes along the way), we know how to put together the perfect healthy snack and drink plangogram (product mix) for students. It’s been a learning experience, but without this experience, success would not be possible today. Without creating the optimal product offering, nothing else matters!

LCD Screens that Educate Students & Catch Their Attention

Beyond the fact that they make the machine look much better, cooler and more innovative, LCD screens also help increase sales at healthy vending machines by educating students about the products inside the machines, providing them with the products nutritional information, & offering nutritional tips & tricks that are useful to students throughout the day. This is all done vi streaming video that can be remotely loaded and, therefore, kept fresh. When getting students to switch to healthy vending, education is so important, and the best way to educate students without doing so in person is via digital LCD screens.

The 1-2-3 Punch

In order for healthy vending to work & succeed at your school, you need all of the above to exist. You can’t do one thing right and two others wrong. You can’t have the best machines and the worst products or vice versa. The entire program needs to make sense and needs to be built for healthy vending success. Healthy vending is not the same game as traditional vending–the delivery method, in that it’s automated, may be the same, but that’s about the only similarity that exists. Everything else is a 180 degree difference. A paradigm shift is needed.

At H.U.M.A.N., healthy vending is our game. Our only game. And our goal is to create healthy vending success where others either cannot, will not, or are not able to do so. I hope we’re able to serve your school and provide your students with a ton of value!

Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, Entrepreneurship, Healthy Vending Guidelines, Philosophies & Beliefs, THE VENDING INDUSTRY, Vending News, Vending Tips & Tricks

H.U.M.A.N.: Creating Healthy Vending Success

February 9, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

Why We Succeed at Schools While Traditional Vending Companies Fail

Education, Marketing & Promotion at School

In the world of traditional vending, an operator will conduct next to no on-location marketing & promotions. They place the machine, fill it, and once in a while change out products that aren’t selling. That’s it. This is a flawed model regardless of the type of business one is running (what’s more important than marketing & education?), and it’s especially flawed when running a business whose goal is to implement healthier snacks & drinks at school.

Healthy snack brands are often times less recognizable than traditional vending machine fare — students need to be taught about the items. Most importantly, they need to taste the items and learn for themselves that healthy snacks & drinks can and should taste good! These are not your grandma’s healthy foods — they taste just as good as traditional vending fare, but are just a whole lot healthier. Via sampling events, coupon giveaways, digital & standard signage, and consistent promotional strategies (all optional but highly recommended), H.U.M.A.N. operators get to know students and integrate directly into the school’s healthy vending initiative. This has a huge impact!

Innovative Machines Made for Healthy Vending

Selling healthy snacks from a standard, ugly, and boring vending machine is like trying to sell a new car from a used auto parts lot. It’s not going to work. Healthy vending success is all about creating a paradigm shift in the students’ minds regarding what vending, or automated retail, is all about. If the delivery channel is the exact same as standard vending, the students’ minds will expect the same products & experience. The delivery channel needs to change.

By using only new, unique looking machines with customized graphics that tell students “these machines are cool, premium, and good-for-you,” students are much more likely to approach them. And when they do approach them, they’re going to expect something different than traditional vending, and this is what we give them. That’s the whole point! Additionally, by adding innovative technology such as LCD screens, cashless card readers, and automatic conveyor sensor systems, the machines’ “cool” factor is maximized in a big way.

Running out of time today! So check out the next blog post for Part II of this bloviation…

Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Health & Nutrition, Healthy Vending Guidelines, Healthy Vending Machines, Healthy Vending Products, Philosophies & Beliefs, Vending Tips & Tricks

90 Day Optimization Period: Do You Have What It Takes?

February 6, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

Every entrepreneur hits road blocks along the journey to the top. The difference between successful and unsuccessful business owners is that successful individuals stay resilient and find a way to get things done!

The vending industry is no different. The first 90 days after a machine is placed can make or break any vending operator’s confidence. If the operators see great sales immediately, they are happy. If not, they label it as a bad investment. What can an operator do to avoid the feelings of disappointment? Work harder!

A lot of learning will take place over the first 90 days of running any business. But hard work and precise planning will set the stage for success. In healthy vending, hosting sampling events, analyzing sales data, and testing new products are a few key tasks that help to optimize the business.

How do these tasks help?

Sampling Events: Hosting on-site sampling events allow potential customers to TRY the products. Some of the healthy brands are not as recognizable, but once a customer tries out a product, he/she will love it! Just 10 years ago many healthy snacks and drinks tasted like cardboard, but with advancement in technology and nutritional science there are TONS of healthy products that taste just as good as junk food!

Analyzing Sales Data: Recognizing what sells and what doesn’t is extremely important. This allows you to create more efficient inventory management and route driving systems. The H.U.M.A.N. machines are equipped with remote monitoring capabilities, which allow you to print sales reports and quickly identify any significant trends. Once you analyze the data, many decisions can be made: lowering prices, raising prices, removing products, placing products differently in the machine. All of these factors effect sales in some way or another.

Testing New Products: Although H.U.M.A.N. Healthy Vending customizes planograms for optimal sales at each machine location, small tweaks will always need to be made along the way. Once you have analyzed the sales data, there may be an underperforming product that needs to be swapped out. Make the switch to a different product, see how it sells, and then reevaluate.

Learn as much as possible, don’t let a minor road bump stop you, and adapt when necessary! Entrepreneurship can be a bumpy road sometimes, but the strong always survive!

Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, Entrepreneurship, Healthy Vending Guidelines, Philosophies & Beliefs, Vending Tips & Tricks

How To CRUSH It In The Vending Industry…

January 29, 2010 By John Pinto Leave a Comment

Many people think the vending industry is simple. Simply stated, it’s not!

When looking at all facets of vending, the most valuable factor is finding the right location. Smoothly operating machines equipped with healthy snacks & drinks, in addition to great service, mean nothing without solid location placement.

Having constructive marketing materials and the perfect pitch are two important aspects of this placement process. Here at H.U.M.A.N., we have developed a location acquisition process that directs us to prime locations. We use a combination of direct mail, fax blasts, e-mail blasts, and telemarketing to narrow down a list of 1,000 locations to just 25 optimal healthy vending sites. Next, we have a H.U.M.A.N. team member, not a third party, travel to the placement site. This member explains to the location personnel the goals of our healthy vending program and why we have considerably more to offer when compared to a standard “junk food vending machine.”

So what comes next? After visiting a potential placement site, our team is sure to follow up. Our team is easy to contact and easy to talk to. Once a contract is signed, the new healthy vending machines are ready to be placed in their new home!

From a business aspect, sales may be worse, better, or equal to what was expected. Many vending operators and companies believe they can do very little to improve their machine sales. H.U.M.A.N. argues the opposite. Of course there are different marketing initiatives that can be done to improve sales at specific locations! A few of the H.U.M.A.N tactics are listed below:

1) Free Vending Dollars: We pass out vending coupons to customers at different locations, allowing them to purchase products for free. This gets consumers to use the machine, so the next time around they are more likely to make a purchase on their own.

2) On-Site Internal Marketing Campaigns: We conduct e-mail blasts, fax blasts, and hand out flyers on-site to make potential customers aware of there new healthy vending machine and what it has to offer.

3) Sampling Events: Typically, healthier brands are not as recognizable when compared to traditional junk food brands. Hosting on-site sampling events allows people to try these new-aged healthy products. Just 10 years ago, many healthy snacks tasted like cardboard, but now, with the advancements technology and product development, companies are sending products in the marketplace that are not only healthy for you, but also, taste amazing!

Filed Under: ADVICE & EDUCATION, Entrepreneurship, Healthy Vending Guidelines, Healthy Vending Machines, Philosophies & Beliefs, Vending News, Vending Tips & Tricks
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