CHICAGO, IL - Farmer’s Fridge, which has provided salads for as little as $7 since 2013 through its salad vending machines, is looking to expand.

“Very early on, a lot of it was proving that you could convince a consumer that you could actually buy a really high-quality meal from what is objectively a vending machine,” the company’s Founder Luke Saunders stated in an interview with Fast Company.

According to the news source, Saunders saw an opening in the market during his first job after college for which he drove 1,000 miles a week through Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky, and found himself eating fast food and pit stop snacks for most of his meals.

Saunders launched his first prototype between a Dunkin Donuts and a McDonald’s in a Chicago food court; five-star Yelp reviews followed soon after. Today, the Fast Company reports, his start-up has approximately 120 vending machines in Chicago and Milwaukee, with plans to double that number this year.

“What we really learned was a lot of the things we were doing were actually extraneous... What we ultimately found was that people just look at the food,” Saunders continued. “And then they try it, and if it meets their expectations or exceeds their expectations, they come back.

In their current iteration, the vending machines are located in a wide variety of Chicago venues: hospitals, office buildings, a 911 call center, inside a CVS and 7-Eleven—the machines are even in university student centers and suburban neighborhoods.

“If healthy food doesn’t taste good, it doesn’t matter how convenient it is,” Saunders explained. “If it’s not affordable relative to the alternatives, it doesn’t matter how convenient or tasty it is. What we’ve learned over the last five years is there’s this triangle of convenience, taste, and value, and we have to be the best on all three. If you can do that, then absolutely you can change the way that people eat.”

This competitive pricing has allowed Farmer’s Fridge to gain traction in places where other healthy fast food options—like Sweetgreen and Starbucks (which also carries salads)—may not.

“We get a report every day that tells us exactly what we need to make for every fridge, we make that to order—we’re literally chopping the lettuce as that number comes in, cutting avocados on the line—the whole business is built around making what the fridges need,” Saunders said of the algorithm that helps predict how much to make, thus reducing food waste in addition to increasing public health.

As Farmer’s Fridge looks toward expansion into the rest of the midwest, we here at AndNowUKnow will keep you in the loop on new produce applications.

Farmer's Fridge