Weekend Plate: Banana Vending Machines: Appealing?

By Carlene Helble

There are times during the day on campus when I’m totally ravenous. Usually it’s right in the middle of 2.5 hour nutrition metabolism class!  But what are my options?  Vending is close to the lecture room, convenient...and high in sodium, fat, and completely lacking in any vegetation. 

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on fruit and vegetable vending machines and ‘The Great Banana Challenge’. It seems obvious that the presence of ‘healthy’ vending would certainly help the ‘pudge’ epidemic in the work place but feasibility has always been an overshadowing issue. Most fruits and vegetables require refrigeration in order to maintain their taste and structure, and in the most basic sense, avoid rotting. Think of the waste if a week should go by where nary a banana is purchased from a room temperature vending machine. How do you keep the fruit from bruising when it drops from its selected spot?  Economically feasible? Not so much.

Del Monte Produce Inc. has made the idea of vending produce practical and appealing (sorry).  Partnering with one of the largest vending machine companies, you may be seeing some better options in E5 than a snickers bar soon! Here are some of the ways they handled the problems:

• Special fruit elevators to eliminate bruising
• LED lights to draw in customers
• 2 temperature zones: 57 degrees for bananas, 34 degrees for pineapple
• Padded retrieval bin
• Plastic packaging for bananas that keeps them from further ripening (keeps them twice as long than without the packaging)

Have you seen these healthy vending options in your area?