After years of running vending routes across the GTA, I can usually tell within a week whether a machine is going to work. It comes down to a few things most people never think about: what's actually in it, where it sits, and who's walking past it. Get those right and the machine pays for itself. Get them wrong and it sits half-empty while everyone walks past it to the corner store.

Here's what actually matters.

What actually sells

Start with the constants. Coca-Cola is the number-one seller, every time — pop carries a machine. After that it's the names everyone knows: a chocolate bar like Kit Kat, chips like Lays Classic. Those are the rows that sell out fastest, and the ones you never want to run empty.

But the thing most operators miss — and it's where a machine goes from fine to genuinely busy — is stocking to the actual team in the building. A workplace isn't a generic crowd. Some of my best-moving products are ones a national planogram would never include: C2, the green tea from the Philippines, or Haldiram's, an Indian snack brand. When the workforce skews a certain way and the machine reflects that, those products fly. A machine that looks like the people standing in front of it will always outsell a cookie-cutter one — and that's something you only learn from running the route and paying attention to who's actually buying.

If your team's also been asking for healthier options, that's its own balancing act — I got into what actually sells on the healthy side in a separate post.

Where the machine goes

Placement is half the game. The best spot is a break room — it's where people already go to eat and take ten minutes, so the machine is right there when they want it. A hallway works too, as long as it's a busy one. What doesn't work is tucking a machine somewhere quiet, off to the side, or upstairs where fewer people pass. I've seen good machines underperform purely because they landed in a low-traffic corner. The machine can't sell to people who don't walk by it.

The other half is headcount. The more people on site, the more a machine moves — a busy floor with a steady stream of breaks beats a small, quiet one every time.

The site makes a big difference

Not every workplace is the same kind of fit, and being honest about that is part of doing it right. The sweet spot for vending is high-headcount, high-traffic sites — factories, warehouses, and large-scale manufacturing along the 407 corridor. Lots of people, steady break traffic, and pop, snacks, and even coffee out of the machine all move well. That's where vending really earns its keep.

Offices can absolutely work too — it just depends on the space and the team. Sometimes the right answer is a smaller combo machine; often it pairs best with a proper coffee setup rather than standing alone. The point is to match the setup to the site instead of dropping the same machine everywhere and hoping it fits.

Cashless isn't optional anymore

If there's one thing I'd tell anyone putting in a machine today: it has to take tap, card, and mobile pay. It's not a nice-to-have, it's a necessity. In my own machines, cashless is at least two-thirds of all revenue — a cash-only machine is leaving a third or more of its sales on the table, because most people walking up just don't carry change anymore. There are plenty of good hardware options now, so there's no reason to run cash-only.

What separates a good machine from a neglected one

The whole thing lives or dies on one rule: the machine has to actually get used. That means rotating the product and keeping it fresh — nobody buys stale chips twice, and a row of sold-out favourites trains people to stop checking the machine at all. Machines break down sometimes; that's part of it. What matters is whether someone shows up and fixes it quickly, or whether it sits dead for two weeks.

That's really the difference between a machine that becomes part of the workday and one that becomes a piece of furniture. A neglected machine — half-stocked, stale, a card reader that's been broken for a month — teaches a whole workplace to ignore it. A machine someone actually looks after stays busy.

If you've got a break room that could use one — or a machine that's currently doing more sitting than selling — that's exactly what we sort out for sites across the GTA. We're family-owned and Vaughan-based, we run vending routes across the region, and we stock and service every machine ourselves, so it's built around your team and it actually stays stocked. Vending in Vaughan and the GTA is what we do every day. Sam answers the phone.