Farmers Fridge transforms healthy eating on the go with Hologram connectivity

Reinventing fresh food with connected vending machines

Luke Saunders, founder and CEO of Farmers Fridge, faced a common challenge during his days in sales: finding nutritious meals while on the road. During his searches for food, he noticed one thing that was everywhere - vending machines. One hungry day he had an amazing idea. Why not use that form factor to transform eating on the go and make fresh, healthy food as accessible as a candy bar?

That was back in 2013, and now Farmers Fridge has grown from a single vending machine in a Chicago food court to a network of Smart Fridges in ~ 2,000 locations across 22 markets in the US. At its core, Farmers Fridge operates with a simple and efficient model:

1. Fresh produce is delivered daily to their kitchen in the Chicago area.
2. A dedicated team prepares ingredients, ensuring everything is fresh and ready for assembly.
3. Products are assembled in an efficient production line, with 6-10 people working on each item.
4. Inventory is allocated to various fridges overnight based on demand.

This process allows Farmers Fridge to maintain the quality and freshness of their products while scaling operations significantly. But that level of efficiency isn’t where the company started its journey.

Connectivity makes or breaks the vision

When the company was founded 13 years ago, there were a number of challenges and obstacles the company needed to overcome. At that time, the idea of an IoT-connected vending machine was a fairly new concept. To quickly get started making revenue, Farmer’s Fridge had to spend a significant amount of their budget to buy off-the-shelf connectivity solutions. Rather quickly they discovered that choice didn’t address their three biggest challenges with growth: reliability, scalability, and affordability.

To try to solve that problem, Farmer’s Fridge developed a direct relationship with a network carrier. While this did help them increase their geographic reach, it didn’t solve the reliability and cost issues that were at the core of their challenges. Every vending machine needed reliable connectivity to operate and generate revenue. Additionally, the model described above relied on data from each of the vending machines to know what to send where. They needed non-stop connectivity at a price they could afford to power both.

“We chose to work with Hologram because the prices were very competitive and we were able to save money. Beyond that, what really stood out with Hologram was the technical expertise and customer support."

– Luke Saunders, President & CEO, Farmer's Fridge

Hologram wins competitive bid

By 2024, Farmer’s Fridge started looking for a new solution that could deliver the scale, reliability, and pricing to meet their business model. After evaluating multiple vendors, Farmer’s Fridge picked Hologram as their connectivity partner.”We chose to work with Hologram because the prices were very competitive and we were able to save money,” noted Luke. “But, we also ran an RFP that surfaced a number of suppliers that also could have saved us money. What really stood out with Hologram was the technical expertise and the customer support.”

Having a scalable solution for all the different types of locations that Farmer’s Fridge operates in was also an important decision criteria. Hologram delivered the carrier agnostic solution that best met their business needs. With dozens of service markets across the country and within those markets perhaps hundreds of locations, like in the basement of a hospital, an airport terminal, everything in between, Farmer’s Fridge needed the flexibility of a multi-carrier solution from Hologram to deliver the reliability and visibility they needed.

“Working with the team at Hologram has been a complete pleasure,” added Luke. “We got clear, concise feedback on the technical feasibility, the implementation and the service. The team are just nice, knowledgeable people that really care about what our business is trying to accomplish and how their solutions can support that versus trying to sell us a solution that maybe isn't what's best for our product.”

Moving to Hologram was easy

Transferring their service to Hologram from a major carrier was very concerning for the Farmer’s Fridge team. They need to process transactions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Any amount of interruption creates major supply chain problems, a significant loss of revenue, and eroded customer confidence.

Understanding the business criticality of the connectivity, Hologram’s team worked closely with Farmer’s Fridge to help show what the cutover would look like and what risks there might be. Plus, the cutover had complexities specific to Farmer’s Fridge. Their implementation was unique in the way they had their fridges set up to connect.

“It was an extremely smooth cutover with ZERO issues. Plus, we've actually been able to upgrade our service to get better connectivity than what we had before.”

– Luke Saunders, President & CEO, Farmer's Fridge

Consequently, Hologram needed to port over the lines and the connectivity in exactly the same setup as what they were using with the major carrier. “We understood the cutover process and knew that we had a knowledgeable team at Hologram to support us if there were any problems,” noted Luke. “It was an extremely smooth cutover with ZERO issues. Plus, we've actually been able to upgrade our service to get better connectivity than what we had before.”

Serving up significant cost savings

One of the biggest drivers in looking for a new connectivity partner was financial. Farmer’s Fridge needed to find ways to lower the cost of the connectivity for their business model to thrive and expand to tens of thousands of locations in the future. The Hologram solution delivered on all fronts.

Luke summed it up: “The ROI with Hologram has been exceptional. We were able to cut our IoT bills in half and the effort from our team to make the change was pretty minimal. From a time invested to money saved perspective, the ROI is one of the best investments that we made as a company last year.” This is just one example of how Hologram is able to improve connectivity for our customers and also deliver them the cost savings to reinvest into their company for growth.

“When someone's hungry, you don't want to disappoint. Our partnership with Hologram delivered significantly lower costs, better service, and more uptime reliability to achieve our goal of making healthy food as accessible as a candy bar.”

– Luke Saunders, President & CEO, Farmer's Fridge

Expanding access to healthy options

After a decade of growth, Farmers Fridge continues to focus on its core mission of making healthy eating convenient and enjoyable. Saunders envisions expanding to 100,000 locations in the future, driven by the belief that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption is key to improving overall health. That growth includes extending Farmer’s Fridge beyond traditional vending machine locations. Now with Hologram’s reliability and reach, Farmer’s Fridge can put fridges in places that may not have had good connectivity like:

• Hospitals to ensure nutritious meals for patients and staff at all hours
• Office buildings and other high-traffic areas for easy access to fresh food
• Universities and dorms for 24x7 fresh, unprocessed food

“When someone's hungry, you don't want to disappoint,” shared Luke. “Having a partnership with Hologram delivered significantly lower costs, better service, and more uptime reliability to achieve our goal of making healthy food as accessible as a candy bar.”

More than cellular connectivity

Understanding where customers are today and where they want to be in the future is a big part of Hologram’s approach for migrations. Working with the customer’s technical and business teams, our sales and solutions teams are able to dig in and understand how to architect the best solution for Farmer’s Fridge. “Since we are not IoT experts, our approach early on was not a best in class architecture,” added Luke “During the scoping process, Hologram was able to understand how we had set things up, migrate us on the exact same architecture, and also provide some insight and advice on a more scalable and sustainable solution for the future.”

At Hologram, we take great pride in helping our customers achieve their business goals. Our cellular IoT service is one part of that, as is our industry leading Hologram Dashboard that helps them manage their connected fleet. As Luke put it, “partnerships in business are how things get done. Having a reliable partner for internet connectivity for our business is absolutely essential. Hologram’s service and support allows us to focus on our core competency – making healthy, fresh food and getting it to people without worrying if they can purchase it.”

Thanks Farmer’s Fridge for trusting Hologram to deliver the connectivity to power your vision for a healthier future.

Trust Hologram with your connectivity

You can count on Hologram for:

• The highest levels of reliability. The new Hologram Outage Protection SIMs feature two fully independent mobile cores on each SIM that seamlessly switch to a backup core in the event of an outage.
• Guaranteed uptime commitment. Hologram includes uptime guarantees in our contracts and 24/7 support to resolve any issues quickly.
• Exceptional performance: Hologram’s low latency and high throughput solution can handle the volumes of data produced by these mission-critical use cases.
• Simplified management. With the Hologram Dashboard and analytical tools, you get real-time visibility into device activity and performance, so you can keep operations running smoothly.
• Global coverage. Hologram seamlessly connects to carriers across the world to ensure your user experience is consistent.

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