Vegan Vending Machines to Sweep Across US

A new company is looking to install plant-based vending machines in strategic places across the US, and it's raised more than $2.2 million in funding to make it happen. The available prepared meals will all be 100% vegan.

leCupboard, which has a cafe in Church Street, Noe Valley, San Francisco is aiming to take their vending machines nationwide.

But they aren't the traditional vending machines full of junk foods and soft drinks - they will contain delicious prepared plant-based meals designed to act as preventative healthcare.

“The goal is to reconnect preventative healthcare with food,” says Lamiaâ Bounahmidi, the founder and CEO of leCupboard:

“Everyone is going around talking about food as medicine, but there is more to it than going organic or eating vegetables.”

Their mission is to turn the food system 'rightside up':

According to leCupboard: "Under the current food and retail industries, our norm is to accept compromises at the loss of accessibility, health, and sustainability. We have paved another way to turn the food system rightside up.

The meals, which are designed for optimal nutrition, include chia pudding breakfast jars, lentil salads and zucchini noodle bowls with walnut pesto and will be conveniently available from the vending machines with affordable pricing.

leCupboard plan to roll out 30 of the vending machines in California over the next 3 months, followed by another 200 across the country soon after.

Supporting their mission to increase the accessibility of healthy living, expect to find these vending machines in places where customers might not already have access to healthy food, such as hospitals, offices, and food deserts - areas where access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables is difficult.

The rate of people adopting plant-based diets is increasing and it continues to get easier and more convenient to go vegan with an increasing number of restaurants and products catering to the rapidly expanding vegan demographic. This year we've seen cafes go vegan after watching a YouTube video, ice-cream parlours ditching dairy, as well as popular pizzerias removing animal products from their menus. The world's first vegan drive-thru opened this month in Canada and a large vegetarian company announced they would soon veganize all their products.

Even New York's largest dairy company completely ditched dairy after declining sales and is now solely producing plant-based milks instead.

Earlier this year in Europe a group of Danish politicians went vegan to bring awareness of the environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, and 24 EU members of parliament signed a letter urging Europe to shift to plant-based diet, citing the health and sustainability benefits.

All over the world people are waking up to the reality that meat consumption, our health and the environment are all intrinsically linked and we are inching closer and closer to the plant-based revolution that Google predicted last year.