When you're running a vending operation, it's easy to stock a machine the way you think it should look — balanced, varied, a little bit of everything. Chips here, candy there, a mix of beverages. Looks good on paper. Looks reasonable in person.
Then you pull the sales data and reality hits.
After reviewing April 2025 numbers at one of our higher-traffic locations, one thing stood out immediately: Poland Spring 20oz wasn't just a top seller. It was more than half of everything moving through the machine.
That's not a small signal. That's the machine telling you exactly what it wants to be.
What a Planogram Actually Is
For anyone not deep in the vending world — a planogram is basically the layout map for what goes where inside a machine. How many facings each product gets, which row, which column, how much space. It's not just aesthetic. It directly controls how much of each product you can carry and how often you need to restock.
A bad planogram means your best sellers run out fast and your slow movers sit there taking up space. A good one means the machine almost runs itself — you're restocking what's popular, not rotating product that never moves.
What We Changed
We rebuilt the beverage layout around the data. Poland Spring went from a standard facing to a significantly expanded presence — more columns, better positioning, larger capacity. We didn't eliminate variety, but we stopped pretending a product that represented 4% of sales deserved the same shelf real estate as one doing 55%.
The slower movers either got consolidated or cut entirely. A few things we thought were safe turned out to be near-zero performers. Out they went.
What Happened After
Restocking intervals got longer on the water side because we could carry more of it. Revenue per visit went up because we weren't wasting capacity on dead inventory. And the number of times a customer walked up and found their product sold out dropped — which matters more than most people realize. An empty slot is a lost sale and a bad impression.
The lesson isn't specific to Poland Spring or to this location. The lesson is that your sales data is telling you something every single month and if you're not listening to it, you're leaving money on the table and frustrating your customers at the same time.
We now review planograms at every location on a rolling basis. The machine gets to vote on what it carries. We just count the ballots.
— Austin & Sam, Freedom Vending LLC · Merrimack, NH