Vending machine salads are organic and made fresh each day

Farmer's Fridge is a vending machine that delivers healthy, gourmet meals made from fresh, high quality ingredients each morning.

Vending machine food isn’t typically known as an example of fine dining, instead serving to provide a quick fix when customers can’t get their hands on some proper food. While we’ve previously seen innovations such as Yves Behar’s Briggo aim to deliver barista-quality coffee from nothing but a robotic kiosk, Farmer’s Fridge is now hoping to do the same for salads — creating healthy, gourmet meals from fresh, high quality ingredients each morning, delivered through vending machines.

The Chicago-based startup collects fresh produce direct from local farms each morning and begins making the day’s salads, breakfast pots and health snacks at 5am. By 10am, the meals are ready and loaded into the touchscreen-enabled kiosk, with any leftovers from the previous day packed up and donated to a foodbank. Ranging from the superfood Detox Salad to the bodybuilding High Protein Salad, each meal is packed into a 100 percent recyclable plastic jar which can be returned to the kiosk once it’s empty. The gourmet salads start at USD 7.99, although the price automatically drops by USD 1 at 6pm each day.

The first Farmer’s Fridge kiosk is currently located in The Loop in Chicago, although the team are set to offer the service in more locations in the near future. How else can vending machines be updated to cater for consumers that demand higher quality products?