Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines The government requires all vending machines to comply with the new health codes which means calorie info must be displayed on the machine for each product before the sale. How are operators going to handle this requirement?
This is part of the healthcare reform act and the reason you need to vote.
AMS has a program to comply with this law, but their new firmware does more than just comply with this regulation. If you have older equipment you’ll need some way to do this. AMS has a retrofit for the Sensit 3 board which can be added to the machine, but if you have a Sensit 3 board, you simply need the new firmware in this way you will have Calorie info AMS Vending Machines.
Advantages:
1. Use your computer to input all the data into the firmware on an SD card and then load it on to each machine. This saves a lot of time.
2. You can load multiple planagrams into your machines – a fantastic resource with flexibility.
The initial cost is less than $50.
Going forward all A&M Equipment Sales refurbished AMS machines will have the Sensit 3 board installed. and will have Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Tom: All right, I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show here again with Larry Towner, who is a vending business consultant with which-
Larry Towner: Service Group International.
Tom: I am having a great show today, everybody.Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines So, thanks for being here Larry. We’re, we’re talking about the new calorie requirements for vending machines that have been coming, that are coming out. The government has basically said all vending machines have to comply with the health codes now and they are required to produce calorie counts for all products in the vending machine if, for vendors, vending operators have more than 20 or more machines. So how are operators going to handle this, do you think, Larry?
Larry Towner :Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines Well, let’s settle a couple of questions. First off, if you don’t have more than 20 vending machines, you’re really not in the vending business. You’re just kind of a hobbyist at best. So it’s really going to affect almost all the people that are in the vending business, in some form or another. I’m just gonna throw out this political statement. Folks, this is part of the healthcare reform act. This is the reason why you need to vote. If you, Tom and I were talking about it before the show, if you think that people are going to look at that display screen and say, “Wow, I was going to buy those Cheetos, but they’ve got 140 calories in it and I’ve decided I’m not going to buy them.” but you need to be well informed, so I guess there might be some things to do with it.
Larry Towner: What we’re going to talk about is we’re going to talk a little bit about one of the manufacturers, it’s AMS or Automatic Merchandising Systems Machines. They have come up with a very, very good program to comply with this law. One of the things that I want to just discuss is that the new firmware that they’re offering actually does more than just comply with this regulation, so we’ll get into it. A little bit is, Tom as you stated, that the government has required that we now have to put calorie counts on there before you make the selection on the machine. If you’ve got equipment out there, particularly older equipment, you’re going to have to come up with some kind of a system to do this.
Larry Towner: AMS has a system available now on their SENSIT 3 boards, which if you’re vending, you know about AMS and you know about the SENSIT boards. This is a retrofit to SENSIT that board that you can put on either a SENSIT 1 or a SENSIT 2 machine, but you can add the SENSIT 3 board to those machines. It’s of course going to cost you a little bit of money to do that. But if you’ve already got a SENSIT 3 board, what this is is this is a firmware update that will allow you to transfer your information to your machines via an SD card. The big advantages that I saw with this when I looked at this program was that you are able to make all of your, or input all of your data from your computer into the firmware program on an SD card and then you transport the SD card out to the machines.
Larry Towner: The real beauty of that is is that if you set your planograms up on your machines and if your planograms are all the same on all your machines, you can just walk up to that machine and in about a minute, you download the new firmware, including all your pricing and all your calorie information into each machine. The great advantage to that, if you know about reprogramming machines is is that in a minute you can do the whole machine and you can do multiple machines in the same amount of minute. In an older machine, I’ve spent a lot of my life in the older machines where you have to reprogram every single column every single time and it would take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to reprice, just to reprice the machine.
Larry Towner: So this is a tremendous resource for you to be able to go out and add a bunch of information onto your machines with just a very, very simple insert of the SD card and a download of your firmware onto that board. In talking to the people at AMS, you can load multiple planograms into your machine so you’re not limited to just one set. You can really, they say an unlimited number of planograms. I think you’re limited by the amount of the space you have on your SD card, but be that as it may, you can put a lot of planograms on a two gigabyte SD card.
Larry Towner: So the big advantage here is, I mean, even if it goes right down or if you want to just reprice your machines, you walk in, you plug that thing in, you set your prices in your office in your free time, and then you just go out and reprice all your machines. Wham bam, thank you ma’am and it’s done. Fantastic resource. Initial costs for an SD card in an adapter to plug it into your board is less than $100. In fact, it’s actually less than $50. So really, really good opportunity. Don’t have to do a whole lot of, don’t have to do any retrofitting, unless you’ve got a SENSIT 1 or SENSIT 2 board. But that’s the greatest advantage. Tom, do you have any questions on this program?
Tom: Well, I was going to ask you what it costs, but it sounds like it’s less than $50 per machine.
Larry Towner: No, it’s not per machine. I’m glad you asked that question. It’s not per machine. It’s you buy the adapter … It’s essentially an adapter cable and an SD card with the firmware on it. You buy that once, you change all your machines. So you’re amortizing that out over the cost of all the SENSIT 3 boards that you have out there in your rotation. So it’s not per machine, it’s a onetime fee.
Tom: I see. Well that’s great. So, that’s good. AMS’ all new machines obviously are going to have this. So that’s how you take care of the machines that don’t have it.
Larry Towner: Well, yeah. All the new AMS machines will have it. Now, Joe at A & A Equipment was telling me he will be retrofitting and anytime he does a refurb job on an AMS machine now, it’s going to have the SENSIT board installed in it. So when you’re looking at your refurbished equipment, just make sure to ask and say, “Does it have a sense at three board in it?” and you’ll be good to go.
Tom: Awesome. Anything else?
Larry Towner: Sounds like a fantastic program to me. It’s very simple to use. You can do it sitting at home on your computer, then you take it out. You can do multiple planograms, you can have … You can segment it by sit by season, by location, by however you want to do it. You can scroll through your various menu options on your on your SD board to see which planogram you actually want to put into that particular machine. So it gives you, really gives you ultimate flexibility and really … I mean, it really is not even a cost. It really is a very nominal costs. Essentially, the cost of an adapter cable and an SD card, which is it’s like 50 bucks. So what? If you’ve got 10 machines, that’s $5 a machine, piece of cake. Compared to some of the systems out there, that’s really, really, really a bargain.
Tom: Awesome. Alright, well thanks Larry. You’ve been watching Calorie Info Ams Vending Machines the Vending Business Show, a production of A & m Equipment Sales.
Larry Towner: Thanks, Tom.
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