Fresh salad in vending machines
Vending machines aren’t where most people look for fresh, healthy food, but one father-and-son duo is trying to change that.
Ryan Hutman and his father, Aaron Hutman, are the founders of Portions, a Montreal-based company that’s selling jars of fresh salad in specially built vending machines.
“We wanted to really provide an accessible solution for people on the go who want to just grab something healthy and tasty,” Ryan Hutman said.
The company’s first machine, in the basement of a library on the McGill University campus, was installed in October. It now has a second machine at McGill and one at Central Station.
“I thought that it was just a great way to distribute food,” said Ryan Hutman. “It’s a much lower overhead than having a retail store, if something goes wrong or if the location’s not great, we take it out and we put it somewhere else.”
The company plans to add five to 10 new machines over the coming year.
“We’d like to bring it to hospitals, we want to bring it to office towers, we’re not into food courts per se, where there’s an abundance of food, it’s in places where perhaps healthy food is difficult to get,” Aaron Hutman said.
The salads stay fresh for between four and five days, though Portions is re-stocking them much more frequently than that.
“Every morning you’re getting a salad that was made that morning, that’s really our value proposition,” Ryan Hutman said. “It’s fresh, it’s not been sitting there for a week and a half.”
There’s an environmental focus to the business — the plastic jars come from a recycling plant in Quebec (while glass Mason jars were considered they proved to be too heavy and the Hutmans were worried they might break) and the vending kiosks themselves are made from refurbished machines.
The company will soon start purchasing all its greens from a hydroponic greenhouse in Laval.
“We are what we say. It’s a sustainable product and I think that’s going to resonate with our customers,” Aaron Hutman said.
There’s also a focus on ensuring the food they’re selling is healthy, the Hutmans said.
“We had a nutritionist go over everything,” Ryan Hutman said. “Our dressings are all made inhouse, very little salt, very little sugar, we don’t add any sugar, actually, to anything, just keeping it all natural but playing around with a variety of spices to really bring out the flavour.”
There are challenges — getting people to try something new especially from something as impersonal as a vending machine hasn’t been easy.
“People are timid, especially with food,” Ryan Hutman said.
The Hutmans plan to start having human “ambassadors” offering free samples at some of their machines and plan to use social media to reach new customers.