Survey for NEW AUTOMATIC COFFEE MACHINE DESIGN

[kascat]

Please take this survey for our team's design

http://goo.gl/forms/f8a8j2e2aQ

[The Mage]

This is your first post.

 

Can you give us more details as to why you want us to take an external poll?

 

Also could you introduce yourself? I am sure more people would respond to a link to a poll if they knew you, and your company a little better.

[PerformaVending]

What the Mage said, exactly.

[kascat]

Of course!

I am a university student currently taking a product design class. My team (2 other students and me) have come up with a new design for an automated beverage machine.

We're looking for customer input because we want to justify our design and see what the public most values in vending design.

If our design, research, and pitch is successful, we may be invited to a second level course in which we actually develop prototypes for our design.

Thank you for your interest!

[The Mage]

Well you picked a good place, I can support that.

 

But don't forget this is a great place for input from the vendor side. The people who would buy the machines, and product to stock them.

[AZVendor]

Your survey refers several times to your "design" but there are no prototypes or drawings to indicate how the machine works. I'm looking at this as your teacher would. You need to ask your questions after the pollee sees what the machine might look like. Your post indicated that your machine would emulate a soda fountain which is self serve, using provided cups, with ice and multiple flavors/additives available for basically a fixed price. The same type of dispensing is used for hot drinks as well though manual creation of the batches takes place. This is all likely in a convenience store setting which is what your reference to a soda fountain conjures up. Perhaps you don't want to mention anything about the fountain aspect if that isn't an accurate description of your design.

You may not be aware of the history of vending machines but there have been post mix soda machines and cup coffee machines and some machines that offered both in the same cabinet over the past decades. In vending, cans and bottles killed the cup soda machines and coffee shops and single cup brewers killed the coin-op coffee machines.

If your machine is geared toward inclusion in a bank of vending machines then know that your cabinet will need to be very large to accomodate 32 oz cups for soda and 16 oz cups for coffee. Your icemaker will need to be very large (past machines served 12 oz cups with only the last designs using 18 oz cups) and as soda has moved to bag-in-box supplies you'll need back room storage for syrup boxes and CO2 tanks (the last cup soda machines went bib and used a second cabinet to house all the syrup boxes). Lastly, the last cup soda machines approached $8000 each and current vending coffee machines are close to $7000. I can't imagine that your machine would be less expensive so that could be your biggest hurdle.

Your survey may lead you to see that the best venue for your machine will need to be a convenience store. That will be a tough nut to crack though as that business model is very profitable selling 32 oz of soda for $1 when their cost per cup is mere pennies. Many of the soda fountains are provided by the bottling companies for free and this may happen with coffee equipment as well.

On this forum, you may not get as many users as you will machine operators so you might want to tailor your survey toward beverage drinkers (which most people are) and separately to your target operator customer who will be more interested in the results of your poll to see if there might be demand for buying your machine to begin with. In spite of the fact that this forum is the most active on the internet you will still need to get your survey out to the public to get enough responses to be meaningful. Maybe using Survey Monkey if they allow free polls? Good luck with your design and your class!