Although there are many touchscreen vending machines in the global market as seen below in the table below, there are very few smart vending machines globally and even fewer in North America. All of our North American competitors manufacture and distribute their own machines at a considerably higher cost than SMRT1 with no rapid scaling capacity and therefore cannot compete with our affordable solution and our ability to provide 100 machines daily. Our strategic partnerships with North America’s largest manufacturers and distributors of vending machines and touchscreens leaves the hardware and vending up to them so we can concentrate on the technology. SMRT1’s ability to ‘plug’ into customers’ already existing API’s and programs allows them to use their existing systems and branding, without having to adopt another program. This is our “superpower” and is our competitive advantage. Although the list of competitors is long, you can see many of the them have very specific niches and target markets allowing room for other smart automated vending solutions (to scale rapidly), considering the market is expected to grow to over $23B and 5.5M machines by 2024, and 38% of that growth is in North America.
The SMRT1 POD a retailer would only have to sell 7 x $20 items a day, at 50% mark up, to pay for the machine in 1 year and 1 additional item a day to pay for the annual subscription fee – now that’s competitive.
