Vending

Smart fridges drive Britain's vending boom

Photo: Adobe Stock

May 27, 2026

Summarize with

The UK vending, coffee service and automated retail industry generated about $5.1 billion in revenue in 2025, according to the Automatic Vending Association 2025 Census & Market Report. The total represented a 3.3% increase over 2024 and placed the sector roughly 5% above pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

Traditional vending and office coffee service operations accounted for approximately $4.2 billion of the total, with strong growth reported across cold beverages, food, snacks and hot drinks.

The report highlighted rapid expansion in cashless and smart retail technologies. Standalone smart fridges grew roughly 50% year over year to 2,850 units, driven largely by demand in hybrid work environments where traditional staffed foodservice operations are less practical.

Micro-market installations also increased 8% to 785 locations. Cashless technology is now installed on 95% of UK vending machines, while about 30% of machines operate entirely without cash acceptance. Among enabled machines, 84% of transactions are now cashless, and mobile phone payments account for 62% of those transactions. Operators reported that cashless customers spend about twice as much per transaction as cash-paying consumers.