{"id":485704,"date":"2026-01-01T22:27:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T22:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/485704\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T22:27:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T22:27:42","slug":"farmers-fridge-turns-vending-machine-salad-into-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/485704\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmer’s Fridge turns vending machine salad into success"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Luke Saunders came up with the novel idea to sell salads from a vending machine 12 years ago, it was so far out of the box that he had to invent a new one.<\/p>\n

Believing that fast food should be faster and healthier, Saunders dreamed up the concept of Farmer\u2019s Fridge without a blueprint on how to do it. For starters, vending machines, which had long dispensed chips, candy bars and sodas to snacking office workers, simply weren\u2019t set up to deliver fresh salads on demand.<\/p>\n

So Saunders, then a recent college graduate and novice entrepreneur, created a prototype, stuffed it with fresh greens, stuck it in a downtown Chicago food court and launched the salad vending company in October 2013.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I started back then, I probably didn\u2019t sleep for a month because I had spent my life savings on a vending machine, and I had to figure out by launching it if people were going to sign up to buy an $8 salad out of a machine,\u201d said Saunders, 39.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, they did.<\/p>\n

A dozen years later, Farmer\u2019s Fridge has\u00a0a 100,000-square-foot kitchen near Midway Airport and thousands of locations across 20 states selling salads to millions of customers. Growth has exploded this year in what has been a very challenging environment for many restaurant chains, as Farmer\u2019s Fridge and its vending machine salads go mainstream.<\/p>\n

The stand-alone salad machines, which have sprouted up in office buildings, warehouses, airports, hospitals and on college campuses, have carved out a new niche in the fast-food and vending industries, with plenty of room for upside, according to at least one analyst.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the economies of scale tend to fit very nicely for Farmer\u2019s Fridge, and I think they\u2019ve got tremendous growth opportunities until somebody else comes into the market and replicates it,\u201d said Darren Tristano, CEO of Foodservice Results, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm.<\/p>\n

From McDonald\u2019s to Portillo\u2019s, Chicago has given rise to some of the most iconic fast-food chains in the U.S. Few have an origin story as unique as Farmer\u2019s Fridge.<\/p>\n

A New Jersey native, Saunders majored in international studies and Chinese at Washington University in St. Louis, but his career path evolved from a side hustle.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was running a bike rental business on campus,\u201d Saunders said. \u201cI was having way more fun doing that, so I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur.\u201d<\/p>\n

After college, Saunders joined his father\u2019s grease lubricant manufacturing business in New York. When his girlfriend and future wife got into University of Michigan Law School, Saunders went with her, leaving the family grease business behind.<\/p>\n

In Michigan, Saunders got a job selling industrial metal finishing products, driving 1,000 miles a week across the Midwest to pitch engineers and factory managers on how to use coatings to improve their operations.<\/p>\n

As a traveling salesman, trying to improve his own diet was another story.<\/p>\n

\u201cDriving all over Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, the only options for me were fast food or a gas station,\u201d Saunders said. \u201cWhen I really wanted some healthier food, I would find a Chinese restaurant and get some steamed vegetables and chicken. This is really way too much work.\u201d<\/p>\n

While fast-casual salad chains like Sweetgreen already existed on the East Coast, Saunders began to ponder new ways to peddle lettuce across the heartland.<\/p>\n