Vending machines are provided in almost all work sites. These are usually maintained by vendors who have to make a profit to justify the presence of these machines in the first place.
In order to make money, they stock the machines with items they are certain will get purchased. These are normally nutritionally vacuous aggregations of preservatives, stabilizers, chemicals, dyes, and artificial sweeteners.
They’re gross. Unhealthy. But profitable.
Here’s a solution that tends to fail.
Just stock healthy items – how hard could it be? Put in bananas, nuts, and all the organic vegan veggie varieties you can shake a carrot stick at, and they will choose those items, be healthier, and get healthy in the process.
However, this strategy turns out to be just as intuitive as it is ineffective because it quickly tumbles into the catch-22 of supply and demand. For example, if the vendor supplies choices that have no demand, they will not get purchased. The vendor makes no money, and the machine becomes unsustainable. Lose, lose.
We’ve seen that this kind of “top down” strategy (i.e., one in which you simply force healthy choices onto your population) deployed with a few of our clients, but never seen it work well. Employees respond with a range of pushback, ranging from grumpy cat face to outright resentment.
“Why is big brother taking away my BIG TEXAS Cinnamon Roll!?”
A More Sustainable Solution.
We take a “bottom up” approach with three components:
- For employees –
- Change purchasing behavior through a series of creative messaging campaigns.
- For employers –
- Verify the nutrient changes through a pre/post nutrient comparison analysis to demonstrate the impact of messaging on behavior.
- For vendors –
- Once we demonstrate the correlation between improved purchasing behavior and nutrient content, the vendor can be approached to supply healthier items the employees demand.
This approach combines rigorous data analysis with a behavior change protocol to solve an otherwise intractable problem toward creating a workplace culture of health.
Oh, and no grumpy cat.
