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Milk vending machines: the dairy farmers’ friend!
Hundreds of farmers in Switzerland and Italy have taken to selling their milk from vending machines, which pay them substantially more than the price they get from processors
by NORMAN DUNNAn attractive alternative to selling milk in bulk to processors is the concept of farmer-owned vending machines that can be sited on roadsides or in market squares. In Italy, a litre sold in this way brings the farmer four times the milk price offered by processors, and the consumer still saves 30 per cent compared with supermarket prices.
Giuseppe Brandizzi is one of the pioneers in this relatively new marketing technique for milk. He runs his cows on fields not far from the country’s capital and markets some of his milk through his own automatic dispensers, either mobile ones which can be moved from site to site throughout the day or static machines in village or town squares, where housewives can fill a litre of fresh milk at any time by slotting in a coin.
Brandizzi reckons that there are around 200 dairy farmers in Italy now selling milk via their own vending machines, which can also be found nowadays situated at farm gates on Italian country roads. The cost of the standard machines with 100-150-litre capacity and including refrigeration and milk stirrer is the equivalent of $37,000 Cdn. “I’m also starting a new project vending from small vans and these will be used for marketing my milk in and around Rome,” he adds.
Brandizzi specializes in “latte crudo” - raw, unpasteurized milk for which there’s a comparatively strong demand in Italy and a niche market in other European countries. But the main aspect is that using vending machines for direct selling of milk is offering a good deal for both farmer and consumer.
While customers pay the equivalent of $1.45 Cdn per litre, the price of pasteurized milk in Roman supermarkets is around $1.85 Cdn a litre. At the same time, the average price paid by processors to farmers is currently from $0.48 Cdn to $0.50.
The unique aspect of the Italian vending machines is that customers have to supply their own milk containers. Government rules do insist, however, that there should be another vending machine adjacent to each milk dispenser, where customers can buy sterile, reusable plastic milk bottles for around $ 0.30 Cdn each.
Italian food safety laws stipulate that the milk vending machines must be thoroughly cleaned and sterilized at least once daily. Most models also have an automatic cleaning system that washes out the filling area after delivery of every third or fourth litre.
The trend for farmer-owned milk vending machines seems to be spreading. Recognized as the birthplace of the automatic milk vender in Europe is Switzerland, where one of the first manufacturers was Alfred Bruni. “We’ve been selling them for 11 years now and have some 400 automatic vendors working in Switzerland. Italy is also an important market,” he reports. “Sales are mainly direct to farmers with about 50 vendors now also working in the Netherlands and some in Belgium too.”
Bruni says that, so far, most farmer-customers have aimed to sell unpasteurized milk via the system, but that pasteurized milk is nowadays also being sold in this way. “In schools, for instance, pasteurized milk is most in demand and we are now marketing a milk shake automatic which will use pasteurized milk and is already being installed in schools. So far, the machines have sold in Germany and in our home market of Switzerland.”
Naturally, milk processors have also noted the growing popularity of farmer-owned milk vending automats and, in Germany, have stepped in to get their share of the sales cake. So far, schoolyards are the main targets in this case. A first project, backed by the government agriculture promotion agency CMA, features whey/milk/milk shake machines in 10 large schools. In the first 54 days of business, the dairy product slot machines sold 27,000 milk or yoghurt-based drinks.
As Bruni emphasizes, for direct sales from the farm, automatic milk vending machines in Europe will probably remain a niche market. Where, on the other hand, farmers take their vending machines on the road and into towns, as in Italy, they then offer a real opportunity to expand the customer base and increase profit per litre, while ensuring that the consumer gets a better deal too. BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.
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