Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It’s Aayush here for Trade Tricks this week. 

You know how sometimes even the most innocuous things can set off a random obsession? That happened to me a few days ago. 

I was in Delhi airport’s Terminal-3, on my way to board a flight to Bengaluru, and I was finding the walk a long one. According to those time-predicting signboards they have all over, my gate was 18 minutes away. So you can’t blame me for getting thirsty. 

Luckily for me (because I would have hated shelling out 200 bucks for juice at one of those posh airport outlets) there were vending machines. Everywhere. 

One every 150-200 meters of that stretch. 

And by about the third machine I walked past, I was hooked. 

Granted, it’s been a while since I have been to T3, so maybe I was getting excited about old news. But it’s not just airports, you see. Lately, I’ve been spotting vending machines everywhere in Delhi and Bengaluru. Hospitals, metro stations, even a PG hostel I went to check out for my cousin. 

Vending machines aren’t exactly new in India, but at least until recently, they were by no means common. 

What’s going on?

Data and digitisation

So those vending machines I just mentioned? Little note: they don’t take cash or coins. Digital transactions only. 

So none of the ritual spitting out of the first three currency notes you feed it. None of the ‘cash is stuck inside the machine’ drama. No discreet punches required. 

That last bit is kinda fun, I won’t lie. But it’s not convenient. And retail is all about speed and convenience now. Which is one reason why smart vending machines like these are starting to pop up all around. And there are a few companies that operate them—NutriTap, InstaGo, Vendiman, Daalchini. 

The latter, founded in 2017, now operates about 1,000 IoT-based smart vending machines across 15 cities, including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, and Bengaluru. 

Doesn’t sound like many, yes, but that’s about a third of the overall smart vending machines in India right now. And smart machines now equal the number of cash/coin-based units—thanks to rapid growth over the last two years. Pre-pandemic, cash- and coin-based vending machines had accounted for ~95% of the total.

So I spoke to Daalchini’s co-founder and CEO Prerna Kalra on what’s making the numbers tick. 

Doing away with cumbersome physical cash and coins is certainly one part of the equation.