Fact is, though, the coffee shop culture has had a huge impact on vended coffee. Quality and flavour became king, almost overnight, with operators tasked by their customers to provide something more like the drinks people could buy on the high street - in terms of choice as well as quality. With coffee being by far the best-selling vended beverage, this provided a great challenge to operators, many of whom had shunned the early bean-to-cup offerings from the machine manufacturers (most of whom had foreseen the trend some time earlier) on grounds of added cost and extra maintenance.

However, there was another problem, in that some consumers in offices were, for the first time, actually going outside to buy coffee, rather than use vending machines provided. Margins were being eroded and so the industry started to pull together to take on the new ‘enemy'.

Manufacturers developed new, more reliable, machines which were easier to maintain, and most operators played their part by adopting a more positive attitude to bean-to-cup coffee. They accepted that it is different technology and it does need understanding to make the most success of it.

All of this called for a new approach and now there is evidence of this in the market. Just about every serious operator has at least one bean-to-cup offering in the portfolio, many have taken advantage of machines which can offer both soluble and b2c coffee. In return, operators have benefitted by being able to upgrade the quality and choice of their coffees, and have been pleased to discover that consumers are prepared to pay a premium price for the products.

With the new added quality and choice (not to mention vastly improved cups - another lesson from the high street), the market is huge and growing and vending is now in an excellent position to take its share of the new coffee culture.

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