Snack vending machines haven’t changed much in decades. You still put the coin in and a candy bar or soda falls out the bottom.
But over the last few years a quiet revolution has been taking place. The machines might look the same to a consumer, but the inner workings of vending machines are growing ever more complex.
It starts with telemetry, or in other words, remote data collection. Modern vending machines are 
outfitted with communications devices that let them “phone home” to a warehouse to tell a delivery person, for example, that it’s running low on chips but has plenty of gum to spare. This saves visits to the machine and can help a company run its vending business more efficiently.
But that’s just the first step. Smart vending machines are starting to include touchscreens, so buyers can see more information on a product before purchasing, such as nutritional information. “Be it because of allergies, intolerances or caloric restrictions or fat restrictions, nutritional display gives the consumer the ability to make educated decisions before vending,” Andrea Ihara, vice president of marketing and business development at Vendscreen, told VendingMarketWatch.
And that’s not all. Touchscreens can also display promotional videos, games or even targeted advertising when a camera in the machine can gauge a user’s age and gender.
SAP itself has worked on smart vending machines for clients. In one case, the client wanted not just inventory tracking but management, so that the products in the machine would change over time based on demographics or seasonal demand. “So now we can drill into any machine on the fly … and observe the low-performing products,” said SAP Mobility’s Christian Bush. “We take the sales data and demographic information in order to predict what the optimal product mix in the machine is.”
The most modern machines have bid cash goodbye, too — a good thing for consumers. (Who carries $1.35 in change on them?) The latest machines accept credit, of course, but can also debit a stored-value account with the swipe of a company badge or the scan of a fingerprint. Others accept mobile payments from a phone’s virtual wallet, and some even accept Bitcoins. Now there’s no possibility of being separated from that bag of Sunchips — unless it gets trapped halfway in the machine. There’s still no cure for that except the old tried and true.