Multi-product vending retail takes off

On-farm vending retail has snowballed on one Flintshire family farm, where everything from raw and pasteurised milk to fresh meat, eggs and honey is available to buy from self-service machines. Vending machine retail at Green Lane Farm, close to the Welsh border with England in Broughton, Flintshire, offers a different kind of food shopping experience.Customers can purchase a range of home-reared organic produce, including beef, lamb, pork, eggs and milk, via several refrigerated and frozen vending machines which have been running since July 2018.Housed in a purpose-built shelter on the farm close to a main route from Chester to Mold, Hope Cottage Farm Shop is now open to customers between 7am and 7pm seven days a week, the busy location in an increasingly populated district ensuring there are plenty of potential customers.Home-producedEverything sold through the vending shop is produced at Green Lane Farm, a 117 hectare (290-acre) tenanted site which has been run by the Arden family since they took it on in the late 1950s.Together, they milk a 160 Ayrshire cows and have a herd of pedigree rare-breed pigs, as well as a small flock of native-bred sheep, laying hens and beehives.Andrew Arden, who runs the business with his parents, Peter and Valerie, his wife Becky and sister, Jane Matthews, explains how the vending route has allowed them to sell their products direct without significant investment in components and labour associated with a more traditional farm shop set-up.Andrew says: "We wanted to sell our produce direct to customers, but we wanted to make sure it would be viable relative to the size and scale of what we had to offer."We considered whether we wanted to employ someone, but settled with machines as the best fit."They can sit in the shop on their own, which means we do not have to be there all the time and can pop back and forth while doing other jobs."Vending retail originally started with raw milk, eggs, honey and rare-breed pork, but the range began to expand within about three months.It now includes beef, mainly from the farm's dairy bull calves, and lamb from the farm's small flock of Llanwenog and Black Welsh Mountain ewes.With more products to sell, they needed more vending machines."It got to a point where we were producing more than the old machines could hold," says Andrew. "We have also been doing deliveries on a Saturday during Covid-19 to local people, particularly those who struggle getting out or who have been shielding"Jane Matthews Initial market research involved several site visits to other locations selling milk via vending machines, but as Jane explains, no other units they visited were retailing produce via vending machines to the extent they hadin mind.Jane says: "We began looking for a local company to take advice from when we were researching how best to expand the number of machines we had."We approached Phil Matthews at Auto Retail Group in Chester, a specialist vending company, who helped us find out more about what vending machine retail options were out there. "Through Phil and his team, we were able to find the type of machines we wanted which were produced in and shipped over from a manufacturer in China."Phil's company worked closely with them to modify the machines to the exact specification we wanted, whichincluded some packing modifications and layout tweaks."First-of-their-kindThe two new refrigerated and frozen machines, thought to be the first of their kind in use in Europe, are now stocked with a full range of vacuum packed and tray sealed meats, eggs, honey, ice cream, halloumi cheese, butter and cream.They sit alongside the milk vending machines dispensing raw and pasteurised milk.After a local abattoir the business originally began using closed, meat is now processed by a neighbouring family friend who has his own butchery.Andrew says: "We pretty much offer a full range of meat cuts now through the machine and we also tend to run an order book, so if someone wants something that is not run-of-the-mill they can get in touch and we can organise that for them." Jane makes the halloumi, while either Peter and Valerie,or Andrew and Becky, with the help of their daughter Eleanor, 20, her boyfriend, Mike, and son Harry, 13, make the ice cream, butter and cream on-site.Self-service modelAlthough popular before, the self-service model has worked particularly well during the past 12 months during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the new machines completely operated from a 32-inch touchscreen.Andrew says: "Lockdown one was really busy for us.