We get a lot of questions from customers about what types of candy do well in bulk candy machines. The most important advice that I usually give people is to stay away from nuts, especially in the beginning. Why is this? When I was getting started with my first vending route (and I had no clue what I was doing), I had peanuts in almost every machine. They were inexpensive, and I thought they would be a good alternative for people who didn’t like candy. What I found is that the peanuts sold the worst in almost every location, and after a few months they went stale and I had to throw them away.

Many people won’t buy nuts from a vending machine because they seem to assume that they are stale or they have been there for awhile. I tried cashews also, and if you don’t already know this, cashews are expensive and have a very low profit margin. If your cashews end up getting stale and you have to throw them out, you are losing some serious money. I would recommend that you only put nuts in a location if they specifically ask for them, and only if they eat them consistently and regularly. Otherwise you are just throwing money away.

M&Ms are good, but they tend to get cracked if there is too much heat or sun in a location. If you have a location where they keep getting cracked, you may want to consider taking them out and putting something else in, instead.

Mike&Ikes and Peanut M&Ms seem to do the best all around in our experience and from talking to customers. Mike&Ikes are especially good because they last a long time and are relatively heat resistant… just remember to spray them with something like PAM cooking spray so they don’t stick together!

We can locate and have located Buzz Byte machines. I might be shooting myself in the foot by saying this, but I would really not recommend them to anyone, ESPECIALLY if you are just getting started in the business. From talking to people who have tried them, they are really not that great at all, and I haven’t talked to anyone who hasn’t lost money with them.

I would rather educate our customers tell our customers the truth about what we have learned than try and scam them out of their money. Being honest has always kept customers coming back in anything I have done. The fact is that lately, if you have been looking for information on getting into the vending business, you have probably come across the Buzz Byte opportunity. I agree that it sounds like a great idea for some markets, but in practice, the widespread appeal of them has been quite disappointing.

I can’t even look on craigslist for anything regarding vending without seeing thousands of these “spammers” talking about how great Buzz Byte machines are and how you need to buy them and get in on the “biggest thing in vending”. If you don’t know what I am talking about, the product is a small rectangular shaped “energy chew” which is supposed to give you all this caffeine and energy. Many people I’ve talked to agree that they taste terrible, and they aren’t worth the $.50 that they vend for. Most people look at those machines and don’t even know what the things are. I think it is better to go with bulk candy machines, everyone knows what M&Ms and gumballs are, and there is already a demand for them.

I know of one woman who got conned into buying a whole bunch of these Buzz Byte machines from the manufacturer (the machines cost around $300 by the way…) and within 2 months she had removed almost all of them from the locations. It just wasn’t worth her time, and instead she bought some bulk candy machines and put them in instead of the buzz byte machines… she is doing much better now with those.

The bottom line: Yes, we will locate these machines for you. But I strongly recommend against these machines because I have heard nothing but stories of people losing lots and lots of money with these machines.

In-person locating is where a locator actually comes out to your area to work with you one on one to get your machines placed. This is the type of locating we specialize in. We will send someone to meet you, and you tell the person which areas you would like to place machines in, and he or she will go into all the businesses in these areas and talk to the owners about allowing you to place a machine there. Some may think that going door-to-door is “slow” or “old-fashioned”, but we have found the highest success rate with this method. Depending on the type of machines you are locating, you may want to take the time to go around with the locator and put the machines in location right on the spot. This is what we recommend, and this will ensure that the machines get placed without any problems or misunderstandings.

With telemarketing, or “telephone locating” as some companies call it in order to make the processes sound more complicated, the locating company will just call a whole bunch of businesses in your specified zip code until they find enough locations for your machines. Usually, they will require additional zip codes.

The biggest downfall to telemarketing is that the success rate is not nearly as good over the phone. This actually matters a lot, especially if you have a lot of machines. You want to have your machines as close together as possible, and you want a tight route so you aren’t wasting your time driving 10 or 15 minutes out of your way for one or two machines. Yes, telemarketing can be faster and a little bit cheaper, but if you route is too spread out, it will not be worth your time. This single point makes telemarketing a bad idea in our opinion, which is why we do not offer these services.

Our customers range from small time operators starting out to some veterans of the industry. Even when you know how to locate yourself, you may find it is much easier and faster and a better use of time for you to pay someone else to do it.

Here is a sample script you can use when locating bulk candy machines for charity:

It’s that simple in the beginning, just let them know what you are doing and get right to the point. Almost everyone is open to hearing about it, with very few exceptions. Some people will say “Yes” right away after you say this, or they may ask questions, or they may say “no” and give you a specific reason, or not.

Most people will ask how big the machine is, what types of candy are in the machine, how often it is serviced, and so on. Just have a conversation with them and answer them honestly. This may seem scary at first, but once you approach a half a dozen prospective locations, it will start to feel natural.

Once in a while, someone will ask what percentage of sales gets donated to the charity. The charities have these programs available because the donations add up and genuinely help them in a big way. Most charities have a phone number where the prospective location owner can call them and find out that it is legitimate and get their questions answered by someone at the charity who knows how to ease their concerns. If a prospective location owner starts to ask questions about how much money gets donated to the charity and starts to give you a hard time about it, I will just tell them that a significant amount goes to the charity, but we do need to pay the overhead of buying the candy and having someone come out to service the machine every month. I tell them if they have any further questions about it, they can call the vending coordinator at the charity directly and provide this person’s name and phone number. Just keep your cool, act a little surprised and smile at them and give them the information openly, urging them to call the charity directly.

If you know statistics on how much money your chosen charity generates from the vending program, you could throw that out there too. One of the most popular charities, the National Children’s Cancer Society, generates over $1,000,000 per year from the vending program. That’s quite a lot of money (and candy machines)! So I might say to the prospective location owner, “I know our charity generates over $1,000,000 per year from these candy machines, so it really adds up.”

If a location owner tells you “no”, there are a few things you can do to turn it around. I will ask them why not, and sometimes they have a legitimate reason, like they don’t have enough space, or they had a bad experience with another vendor in the past. You can always tell them “Try it out for a week or two. We can leave it here, and if you don’t like how we are taking care of the machine, or you decide you don’t want it anymore, just call the phone number on the top of the machine and we will come and pick it up.” This works in some cases.

The key is to keep talking to them after they say “no” to find out more information. It will only take a couple minutes and who knows, you might be able to get the location after all. This was the biggest mistake I made when I started locating.

You want your “script” to seem natural, as if you are just starting a conversation. You don’t even need a script really. The most important thing is that you are genuine, confident, and smile at people and look them in the eye. If you have this part down, what you say doesn’t even matter that much.

Locating candy machines is just like anything else in sales. It’s a numbers game. Don’t get down on yourself or take it personally when people tell you “no”. This is just part of the process. When I started locating, I used to keep a piece of paper with 50 or 100 check boxes drawn on it. Whenever I got a no, I put an X in the box. When I got a yes, I put a check mark in the box. This may sound silly, but it will really help you to see the big picture. If you talk to enough people, you will get those machines placed. That’s all there is to it.

If you aren’t comfortable with sales, or you’ve been trying it without very good results, you can always hire a professional locator to get them out for you. If you work with us, your experience will be very painless. We will get your machines out there in no time and leave you wondering why you didn’t call us earlier!

All of our customers want to know where the best locations for their vending machines will be. What types of businesses? Where inside a particular location will get the most traffic? Many people new to the vending industry think that this is an easy question to answer, but it is actually a very difficult question to answer.

We can always give pointers based on what we have seen work in the past, but often times we are surprised by reports from our customers of what the best and worst locations actually turned out to be. Many locations that seem very busy with a lot of foot traffic have turned out terrible in reality. Then, there are often stories of places where the machine is out of the way, in a small little place that nobody seems to go and ends up being a spectacular income generating location.

We have found over and over again with very few exceptions, that the employees who work at a location are the ones who use the machine the most. This seems like it may be contrary to common sense, but we have seen this, and many of our customers have also relayed this information to us. Take two similar pizza carry-out / delivery restaurants as a hypothetical example. They both get a good amount of foot traffic, but maybe one of them only produces $15 per month, while the other is producing over $60 per month and the machine always seems to be empty whenever it is time to service it. This is a real example from a route that I personally run. In the really good location, it was the employees that were getting addicted to the candy, and they were always using the machine several times per day.

I have also had one particularly bad performing machine in a Chinese restaurant that was open late into the night because they had concerts and comedy shows going on upstairs. The location obviously got a LOT of traffic, but the machine was one of the worst I had, selling less than $2 per month! The problem was that the owners of the restaurant wanted us to have it in the side entrance, apparently a door that nobody uses. They refused to let us put the machine in the front entrance or anywhere else. Eventually, I decided to take the machine out of that location because it wasn’t worth it.

One of the best locations I have had was inside a dirty, grungy auto parts warehouse in the interior hallway. This is a place that most people would think would be terrible. It was dirty, small, and it wasn’t in a place where customers would even know it was there. But there were several employees that used the machine constantly, and that consistency of use every day really adds up.

Sometimes you think you have an idea of how well a location will do when you are placing a machine. But I would estimate that more than 50% of the time, your idea is wrong. The only real way to tell if a location will be good or not is to try it for a few months, try asking people at the location what they would want in the machine and what they would like the most, and wait and see.

I am thinking about getting into the bulk candy vending business or I just got started in the business. What’s all of this that I hear about charities? Could you please explain? Should I be working with a charity? What are the positives and negatives to doing this?

One of the largest issues to overcome with bulk candy vending is how you will convince the location owner to place your machine in a particular location. Some vendors pay a commission directly to the location owner, this is usually 10%. Most people don’t realize that bulk candy machines don’t make very much money per month. The national average is about $10-$15 per month. Many other locating companies and people selling machines or routes will grossly overstate this figure, but you will find they have no way of backing it up. If you are paying a location $1 or $1.50 per month to have the machine there, they will often times get very suspicious. They will start to think the machine is making more than you are paying them, and if they get greedy you can easily lose the location.

This is where various charities saw an opportunity for donations and created “Vending Outreach Programs”. You, the vendor, pay a small amount, usually around $1 per machine per month to the charity. In exchange for this donation, the charity gives you stickers to put on your machines letting the location owner and customers know that a portion of the proceeds is donated to the charity. The charities also have marketing material available such as brochures, ID cards identifying you as working with the charity, and they allow you to use their name to help place machines.

This is really a win-win situation for everyone involved. The location owner gets to know they are making a difference by helping out a charity, the vendor now has an easy way to place machines in locations, and the charities themselves raise an enormous amount of money for their various causes. One of the most popular charities, the National Children’s Cancer Society, raises over one million dollars each year with the vending program alone.

Please keep in mind that many charities only work with vendors who are placing bulk candy machines. If you have bulk candy machines, or you are thinking of getting into the bulk candy business, working with a charity is the best way to go!