Hot Food Vending Machines

The streets of New York had to wait fifteen years for the hot food vending machines to come back. These machines work with coins and are a success in Japan and some cities of Europe.
The firm Bamn! has decided to introduce the concept to St. Marks Place, a legendary street of the East Village of Manhattan.

The first store of the firm, whose slogan is 'automatic satisfaction', includes dozens of automatic devices that offer snacks and junk food for one, two or three dollars.

Like a chapter of the cartoon “The Supersonics”, New Yorkers and bleary-eyed tourists walk around this area 24 hours a day just to taste the nutritious capsules or take a picture as a sourvenir.
This store offers a great solution for that worker who wants to eat fast and does not want to deal with unbearable shop assistants and make long queues in front of cash registers.

One of the owners of Bamn!, Robert Kwak, affirmed that the basis of the business is to “be focused on the kind of food you can order and eat fast but that it is not basically fast food. They are perfect canapés for the busy people of New York”.

The menu of the machines, which are distinguished by their pink color, consists of pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers and delicatessens such as Hawaiian “musubi”, teriyaki chicken, peanut butter and marmalade pie, green tea ice-cream and Japanese donuts.

The creator of the menus, one for breakfast and one for lunch and dinner, is the Water Club chef Kevin Reilly. In the long term, he wants to have a bigger demand for his canapés than for a burger of McDonald's. It was precisely the chain of golden arches that made these machines fall into oblivion. They were a success in the 50s. There were 180 machines in New York and Philadelphia.
Bamn!'s concept is quite simple: people do not have an after-lunch/dinner chat and there is no time to lose. Kwak said, “We want the younger generation that did not grow up in the era of the vending machines to experience them”.

This tendency was established in American Hotels that are replacing the gifts vending machines for vending machines that offer toothpaste to the lodgers any time at dawn. Also, the firm Zoom Systems joined this tendency with its “Zoom Shop” machines that offer a great variety of items ranging from beauty products to DVDs, digital cameras, and iPods. These machines can be used with credit cards and they are located in the airports of San Francisco and Atlanta.

The fact is that the Americans are madly happy with these little machines and this is how CNN presented it.