Tree Frog Vending

2/23/10

Welcome to our new "blog"!  We'd like to start our first entry by suggesting some products that most people might not know about, but that our staff raves about.  First off, from our intern Micah, Fresca soda.  In his words, it's "the best soda that nobody knows about!"  Similar to Sprite or 7-Up, but better, in our humble opinions.  We have this in exactly one site right now, a college, and they rave about it!  Sells out every couple weeks, and we have two columns of it in the machine.  Beats even the Coke, which is generally our bestseller wherever we put it. 

Also recommended by Micah, and almost never requested by customers, is Vault and Vault Red Blitz.  Apparently popular with the younger crowd, and most adults just haven't caught on yet.

Preston and Diane recommend any of the Vitamin Water flavors.  They're all good.  People who have had Vitamin Water love it.  Those who haven't think, vitamins, and water...yuck!  But seriously, they're very tasty.  Revive (fruit punch) and XXX/Acai Blueberry-Pomegranite are our two best-sellers, but they have about every other flavor you could imagine also.

Let's see, what else is new?  The energy drink segment is really booming right now.  If you have customers/employees in their 20's and 30's, this is probably something they would love to have in the vending machine.  Red Bull, NOS, Rock Star, Full Throttle...these are all a huge hit pretty much everywhere we put them.

Lastly, we'd like to highlight some of the low-cal options that are starting to become very popular, as many Americans struggle to keep the weight off.  Coke Zero and Cherry Coke Zero are Preston's favorites (and Caffeine Free Diet Coke, if you're trying to cut back on caffeine), and in sticking with the family theme, our cousin Mike recommends Diet Coke with Splenda.  Mike lives in California, and says this is really big out there, as it is recognized as being much better for you than the standard Diet sodas.  We haven't had any requests for it out here just yet, and wanted to help spread the word.

7/23/10

Today we'd like to follow up on our first blog, and highlight our ever expanding product line.  Our staff here at Tree Frog Vending has put a ton of time and effort lately into researching new and different products, meeting with vendors and distributors, trying samples, and just in general shopping around for more tasty treats to put in our vending machines.  We feel that we've always offered high quality, popular products that our customers like, but realize that even with the best products, people get tired of the same selections week after week.  So we're in the process of hugely expanding the products that we offer, and in the coming weeks and months you should see lots and lots of items in our vending machines that you've never seen before.

To highlight a few, first off the one we're most excited about is the Cloverhill line of pastries.  The Big Texas Cinnamon Roll has been rated "Pastry of the Year" 5 years in a row by Automatic Merchandiser, and when you taste one you'll see why.  We put these in several machines as a test, and they immediately became our top selling pastry, so we plan on offering these very quickly to all of our customers.  They also have many other good choices...the Apple Round Danish, Cherry Cheese Claw, Cherry Lemon Danish, and Strawberry Banana Danish, to name a few.  Beyond that, the other addition we're quite excited about is a broader line of trail mix products.  The Kar's Sweet and Salty and the Kirkland Trail Mix have been HUGE bestsellers ever since we introduced them, they sell out before any other product in virtually every machine we've put them in.  So we're obviously on to something there, and plan to greatly expand our trail mix line soon.  Kar's has a bunch of interesting varieties that we've sampled and really liked...The Mango Pineapple Trail Mix, Nut 'N Yogurt Trail Mix, and the Yogurt-Apple Nut Mix being my personal faves.  

Other products we're now offering are Vitamin Water's new line of Zero drinks (zero calories, but quite good), Rye Street Kettle Cooked Potato Chips (Kickin' Jalapeno, Parmesan and Garlic, Bar-B-Que...7 flavors in all), Dolly Madison and Duchess mini-donuts and other pastries, and Starbucks instant coffee packets, to name a few.  And by the way, if you're skeptical of Starbucks' instant coffees, try one.  They don't taste like instant coffee at all, and really shouldn't be in the same category as many of the other instant coffees out there! 

But anyway, lots of good new stuff coming up.  Of course most of our time is spent restocking our vending machines, setting up new machines, meeting with potential customers, etc.  So there's always good products out there which will escape our notice.  Which is where you come in!  If there's a product you've tried at the grocery store or wherever that you just loved, and you think it would be good for our vending machines, let us know and we'll check into it!

10/7/10

We've noticed as the business has grown and we've placed machines in larger and busier sites that we're often in the way! :-)  Busy break rooms, lobbies, places like that.  We try to be as unobtrusive as possible during our restock visits, but by the nature of what we're doing (with a large cart and lots of product tubs, spread out in a generally small room), it does sometimes get in the way.  And at the same time we're noticing this, we're finding that it's getting harder and harder to fit everything we need to do into an 8-5, weekday timeframe.  A good problem to have because it shows our business is growing!  But a problem nevertheless.

So we've decided to begin offering evening or night restocks to any customers who would like it.  Keeps us out of your way during your peak hours, and allows us to spread out more and take our time.  We like to spend a lot of time cleaning the machines, analyzing what is selling and what isn't, introducing new products, testing the machine for problems, things like that which are pretty time consuming.  Hard to do in the middle of a rockin' busy lunchroom! 

Of course most of our restocks will continue to be during the day, and it is nice to have that interaction with our customers and be able to get feedback and such.  But for any businesses who would like us to restock during off-hours, this is a service we now offer.  All we would need is some way to get into the business at night.  For those of you who are open 24 hours a day or have 24 hour security, this is obviously not an issue.  For everyone else, we would need a key or door combo or however you are set up.  As I'm sure you've noticed, we have a great staff...most of them are close relatives of mine, and those who are not have been carefully hand selected.  And I've committed to doing a lot of these night-time restocks myself, because honestly, I'm quite the night owl and am often up anyway! :-)

Please let us know if you would be interested in changing from daytime restocks to evening or nights, and we'll make the switch right away. 

And one side note about the last blog entry...we've taken shipment of our first batch of new products, and begun putting them in our customer's machines.  We've also altered our customer preference surveys to reflect the new products we are offering.  If you would like new surveys for your employees, customers, etc. to fill out, please let us know!  We'll fax or e-mail them over right away, or drop them off at the next restock, whichever is most convenient for you.

1/11/2011

Happy New Year Everybody!  So today I wanted to cover an idea that we've been throwing around for a while now...offering coffee service to our clients as well.  In the very beginning when we started the company, we offered coffee vending machines, but never had a single customer ask for one.  Now that I've been in the business for a while and talked to lots of other folks in the industry, it's clear why...coffee vending machines are very difficult to maintain, and break down, get clogged, etc. quite often.  And as anyone knows who has ever bought coffee out of a hospital or airport vending machine...the coffee tastes awful!  So we pretty quickly took that option off of our website, and focused on drinks and snacks.  But it's always been something that's been in the back of my mind, because soooo many people (myself included!) are avid coffee drinkers.

At our office as well as at my house, we have the Keurig K-Cup brewers, and they're great!  For anyone who hasn't used one, you pop this little pre-made cup of coffee grounds into the machine, push a button, and it makes a cup of coffee in like 30 seconds.  Good tasting coffee too!  There are tons of different coffee brands and flavors available for the Keurig system, way too many to name here. Light, medium, or dark blends, flavored coffees, seasonal, decaf...whatever type of coffee you like, it exists in K-cup form.

So the idea we're throwing around now is offering our customers a free Keurig brewer (which costs between $100 and $300 depending on the model), and then providing everything the site would need for their employees to make coffee...the K-cups themselves, creamer, sugar, stir sticks, whatever is requested (and then charge for those products of course).  Would be a great way for an office or really any site to offer good coffee service to their employees, at a pretty minimal price.  We'd restock the coffee and accessories at the same time we restock the vending machines, and would be available to run those products by 7 days a week if a site were to run out in between restocks.

But anyway, this is still in the preliminary stages of planning, so I wanted to get our customers' feedback on this...see if any of our current sites (or any potential new customers) would be interested in this service.  If there is some interest out there, we'll probably go forward with it, and make this a regular part of the service we offer.  So please call or e-mail if you are interested, or have any feedback or ideas!!

Hope you all have a prosperous 2011!! 

4/1/11 

So as Tree Frog Vending has grown, and developed an advertising budget, we've been able to advertise in more and more places across the internet.  Which has brought us lots of new business!  But it's also brought us lots more calls about services we don't offer...types of machines that we don't carry, requests from sites that are too far away for us to service, requests to buy machines, requests to sell machines, requests to fix other people's vending machines, things like that. 

As a result, one of our latest initiatives is to start (and grow) a list of other small businesses in Colorado who might service areas of the market which we don't.  Of course part of this is so that those companies hopefully would refer business back our way as well, but also because we think it's good customer service!  If a customer thinks enough of our ad or our website to call us looking for help, we'd like to be able to help them, even if it means pointing them to another company and losing the business.  Kind of like when you go in, say, Ace Hardware, and they don't have what you're looking for but they point you to another area business.  I LOVE when companies do this, it really speaks highly of them that they will do the right thing for the customer even if it costs them the business.  So we're going to get a list going of reputable area companies that offer vending-related services which we don't.

My personal philosophy is that no single vendor can handle every account in Colorado (at least not well!), not even the big guys like Coke and Pepsi.  So I look at other vendors not so much as competition, but as colleagues.  There are several area vendors who I talk to on a regular basis, and we bounce ideas off each other, discuss problems we've run into, etc.  I think this is good for our customers, and healthy for the industry, and hope to do what I can to further this!

 If you're the owner of a small business in Colorado who provides vending service or repairs vending machines or sells vending machines, or any other vending related service, please get in touch with us and we'll add you to the list!  And if you're a customer who has had experiences (good or bad) with other vending companies, please give us your feedback.  If we hear a lot of good feedback on a particular company, they'll be high on our referral list.  If we hear a lot of bad feedback, we'll make sure they're not on our list at all. 

 As always, your comments, thoughts, and ideas are most welcome!  Call or e-mail anytime.