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.

Peek inside a vending machine. Photo: salimfadhley, Flickr.

What do AOL's vending machines look like? "White Castle burgers, five different varieties of Hot Pockets, Klondike bars and Oreo ice cream bars next to a sign offering a discount for Weight Watchers. I think it's safe to say that our vending machine area is being used as a Skinner box," reports Kristyn, a fellow AOL employee.

One employee's behavioral experiment is another's paradise. "I'm really, really jealous," says Jon over at MTV Networks, after being informed of AOL's snack excesses. Featuring far more pedestrian fare like Rice Krispies Treats, Nacho Cheese Doritos and Reese's Pieces, MTV's vending options won't turn any heads. Jon laments that the only real stand-out is the 25-cent can of Coke. "I guess that proves that international conglomerates are in cahoots!" he says. Or it's just a ploy to keep people awake and alert for optimum productivity.

Other big companies aren't faring much better. Jen gave us the scoop on IBM's snack selection, which was similarly standard, with plenty of chips, candy bars and the like. Still, they do try to push some healthier options. "There's a green leaf next to anything that is considered a 'balanced choice,' " says Jen. "It shows IBM's effort in trying to bring about some healthy options to a typically unhealthy way to get food." Don't expect to see any quarter Cokes, though. "The prices are really high, almost $2 for a small bag of chips," she notes. "Price alone would be the reason I wouldn't purchase from the vending machines." Maybe this is IBM's way of discouraging vending machine snacks in favor of fresh fruit or brown-bagged options?

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]

This is probably going to start a trend: hospitals in Wales have banned vending machines that sell soda and candy.

They are going to phase out the vending machines over the next six months. But one hospital, University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, will still have junk food vending machines in 2010. Not sure why they get special treatment, but if you're visiting someone in a Wales hospital and have a craving for Cadbury chocolate, you'll have to go there.

The junk food machines are going to be replaced with machines that have healthier food options, such as fruit juice. Though I hope they're looking at the sugar content of some of those so-called "healthy" fruit juices.

Try though you might, Starbucks is making sure that you just can't escape their brand, regardless of where you go. In a joint venture with PepsiCo, Starbucks plans to expand their hot coffee offerings to the world by the use of vending machines. Apparently they will be located in places where full-sized stores just aren't feasible, such as universities and train stations.

Since the company is already selling chilled bottles of their various Starbucks beverages in gas stations, convenience, and grocery stores, the new vending machines will focus on their hot beverage line-up including roasted coffee, various lattes, and hot cocoa. They plan to test the machines this summer, and will reach broad distribution by wintertime.

So, this means that on any given day consumers can brew their own Starbucks beans at home, pick up a latte at a Starbucks store, crack open a bottled iced Frappucino, or pop some coins into a machine and wait a few moments for their hot drink to brew. Is this too much, or are the Starbucks lovers out there glad you can access your favorite beverages wherever you go?

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.

Now that we are facing all kinds of bans on junk foods from schools, a new product has come to take the place of sodas, long blamed for childhood obesity: good old milk.

In October of this year, Bravo Foods International Corporation will begin shipping a new drink called Slammers. These 8 oz. "snowman-shaped" bottles are manufactured so that fit into the same slot that currently holds a 12 oz. can of soda in vending machines. Slammers are 99% fat free milk, have no preservatives, do not need to be refrigerated (which I can't figure out since the product is milk), and have a shelf-life of 6 months.

Hopefully,the different flavors will be cool enough to help kids forget about sodas: 3 Musketeers flavored chocolate milk, Coco Puffs,Trix, Vanilla, Hard Chocolate, and Scrochin' Strawberry.

I grew up in the Midwest and have been on the West Coast for a long time, so I really have no experience with an automat, but I've definitely eaten through my share of vending machines. Work through lunch? Sure, lemme go gran a Diet Coke and a bag of Funyuns!

But New York's new Bamn! at 37 St. Mark's Place (between 2nd and 3rd Aves.) is bigger, better, and badder ass than a regular vending machine. It serves real food, and hot, too: burgers, mac & cheese, pizza, chicken strips, grilled cheese, hot dogs, and pork buns. Most importantly, as their website says, it is served 25 hours a day.

Is Bamn! God's gift to gourmets-on-the-go? The boys from Slice NY and A Hamburger aToday made a recent visit, but according to Adam, Bamn! isn't all that: "I wish I could say 'hot and delicious treat,' but the offerings at the newly opened automat Bamn just didn't stack up."

[via: Slice NY]

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.

Legislators in Illinois have voted against a proposed junk food ban. The bill would have eliminated all junk foods from vending machines in elementary and middles schools, grades K-8, in the state.

Though the governor supported it, the rest of the law makers said that it was not enough to look only at the foods offered in vending machines. A bill that was to support good nutrition in schools should require that the nutritional content of cafeteria food be examined as well. Not only would the bill have to be more balanced, it would have to apply equally to all children. Some of the original drafts contained rules that varied by age and were full of product exceptions. For example, children through grade 5 "would be limited to beverages containing 100 percent fruit juice, while drinks for middle school students could contain as little as 50 percent juice" and pretzels would be allowed, though almost no other "chips" would be.

It sounds as though the school board, which is collaborating with the law makers, and the government are on the right track in their desire to have healthier kids. Once a balance is reached, the legislature is sure to push a bill through.

There was a time when a vending machine simply dispensed chilled sodas. After that, they carried a full range of candy bars and salty snack products. There were even vending machines that brewed you a cup of coffee and heated your instant cup o' soup. Soon other industries beyond food will be able to stock their wares in these machines, traditionally only food-delivery systems. The Denver Post reports that Safeway supermarkets in Colorado have been testing these machines in stores since late last year. Nestled amongst food products, the Zoom Shops carry such goods as iPods, Playstations and DVD sets. Don't dig out the retractable quarter on a string from your childhood, though. That trick may have gotten you a free Coke, but these new machines only take credit cards. Will there eventually be a middle ground between 65¢ packets of pretzels and iPods - like a blender or a mid-range toaster oven? Only time will tell....

 

For employers, it pays to keep sugary, fatty sweets around the office. They don't even have to be good sweets, as almost anything left in an office break room will be consumed very quickly by hungry coworkers. But experts are saying that employees who have access to junk food through a vending machine or office refrigerator will work more hours each day. If a snack like donuts is put out in the morning, employees will regularly begin showing up earlier. Sugar also increases alertness and boosts productivity. Automated Merchandiser, an industry vending machine publication, has picked up on this story and is using it as a selling point to boost in-office sales.

To protect your waistline, it is best to bring snacks from home for eating in the office. A piece of birthday cake once in a while is fine, but when you're having two donuts and a Twinkie for breakfast, it's time to cut back.