Feature: What do consumers want from automated retail?

Growth in the away from home market is mainly driven by inflation – a symptom of an ailing economy, environmental shocks and geo-political tensions.

There are, however, pockets of good news and opportunities, such as the vending sector, which is showing market-beating growth.

In 2024, while the total UK food and drink market grew 5.4% to £274 billion, total revenue for UK vending, office coffee service and coffee-to-go rose 9.6% to £3.66 billion, including product revenue growth of 13.3% to £2.14 billion. This saw the sector reach the milestone of exceeding pre-COVID revenue, surpassing 2019 by 1.5%.

But if this growth is to continue, IGD believes we must understand what consumers want from vending and automated retail (AR) generally. 

Automated reality 

To find out, earlier this year we held a five-day online community, where we gleaned from 20 British consumers their opinions of and attitudes towards AR. This included a mix of demographics and usage. 

To validate our qualitative research, we also surveyed over 2,000 British consumers with questions on their usage habits, attitudes, and opinions on AR.

Predictably, we found vending machines are easily the most used form of AR, with 33% of respondents saying they’d used them in the past three months. Next were smart fridges (9%), micromarkets (9%), and staffless stores (8%).

The top locations where people used AR were supermarkets (29%), hospitals (25%), the office/workplace (25%), convenience stores (24%), train stations (23%), petrol stations (22%), and gyms/leisure centres (21%).

Younger, affluent consumers in London are the most engaged users for all four AR solutions, which matches the overall trend of adoption steadily declining according to age group. Approaching two thirds (59%) of people aged 65+ and nearly half (46%) of people aged 55-64 agreed that nothing would make them more likely to use AR, while just 11% of those aged 18-24 and 18% of the 25-34 group felt the same.

What can we draw from this? Firstly, older consumers are perhaps less exposed to the newer types of AR and may be unaware of advancements in product range and quality. Lack of confidence with unfamiliar technology likely plays a role, too.

However, there is also a general trend across all age groups where lack of familiarity prevents adoption. 

Read the full article on page 48 of our August issue.

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