Photo: MooBella

Imagine you're at your desk and the 4 p.m. munchies strike. You walk over to the vending machine and are faced with chips, soda or freshly customized ice cream from the MooBella machine. Disaster or delight? Probably both.

With 96 possible variations, based on 12 flavors, 3 mix-ins (candy, cookies, etc.) and two varieties (premium and light), it will take a while to get bored. Variations include pistachio chip and mocha cookie. The company says the 100-percent all natural dairy ingredients are shelf stable until mixed and flash frozen right inside the machine. Will this strange and mysterious process yield a deliciously creamy frozen treat or one that's slightly off?

The first machine is located at Northeastern University, but 100 are scheduled to be installed throughout New England in the near future. We'd love to hear from anyone who's tried the stuff. Spill it in the comments!

Bratwurst. Photo: Keaggy.com.

A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:

Grillwalkers are the newest street-food trend in Germany. Vendors with propane canisters strapped to their backs and grills suspended from their necks sell freshly grilled sausages to passersby.

U.K. man finds an apple that's perfectly split, half green and half red. Experts say that the odds of finding an apple with such perfect symmetry are more than 1 million to one.

Nationwide, restaurants participate in Share Our Strength's Great American Dine Out to benefit child hunger through Sep. 27.

Someone left a bacon bookmark in a U.K. library book; it was found by a librarian/artist who added it to his collection of quirky items left in returned books.

Coming to an office near you: Del Monte has a new line of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables specifically designed to work in vending machines.

I went to college in a small town. Most local establishments closed up long before the nightly urge to snack hit strong and so often, we'd be forced to head for vending machines to satisfy our hunger. The chips and crackers did the trick, but if we wanted a little interaction along with our snack we were simply out of luck. The students at Carnegie-Mellon University are quite familiar with the unconventional dining hours that they and the rest of their cohort keep and so are working to address the situation in a new and unique way. They're creating a Snackbot.

The Snackbot will be a social and autonomous robot that will roam the halls of a multiple campus buildings, selling snacks and interacting with students. It is still in development, but project leaders expect that completion of the first fully functional Snackbot should come in 2009.

What do you think of this project? Would you want to buy a late evening snack from an interactive robot?

[via Eat Me Daily]

Over the course of the last year, schools have come under fire for putting unhealthy options in on-campus vending machines, prompting some states to ban junk food and others to try and work out healthy snack plans with the food companies. As a result, many schools have been left without snack and soda vending machines. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you can bet that at least some of the kids are disappointed.

To try and take up some of the slack that the departure of unhealthier fare left, the Dole fruit company has taken its own initiative to start a program "that will put vending machines selling healthy food products into schools." Dole's machines will stock fruit, fruit bowls, salads, sandwich wraps and milk. The salads and sandwiches will be prepared fresh at a nearby (or possibly on-campus, if available) cafeteria.

The machines will be launched in 15 schools in four states - Mesa, Arizona; Denver, Colorado; Shawnee Mission, Kansas; Corpus Christie, Texas and Conroe, Texas - in February, but the company has high hopes and is already working on plans for expansion.

It looks like you won't have to fish for change to get that bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos and Diet Coke for lunch out of the vending machine. Thanks to a partnership between MasterCard and Coca-Cola, vending machines are now taking all forms of payment, including credit and debit cards. In Philadelphia, 1,000 of these card-swiping vending machines have been rolled out.

At first, it sounds great. "Wow! I can use my credit card! I don't have to carry change anymore!" But, as the article states, the concept "inevitably raises questions about when a convenience might become an enabler, encouraging consumers to drink more soda or buy more candy, while spending money they don't necessarily have" and health professionals are worried.

Now, I am all for convenience when it comes to shopping, and a credit card certainly makes it easier to make a purchase. However, if you don't have seventy-five cents, do you really need to take out your credit card and charge that tiny amount? If you don't have the change, skip the snack and wait for a real meal.