Story
Local owners, local service, and the same routes for twenty years. How this company got here, and what it means for whoever ends up servicing your break room.
Published September 9, 2026
Almost every vending company’s website says it serves your area. Very few of them mean it the way you need them to.
We’ve been running routes through St. George, Cedar City, Richfield, Kanab, Beaver, and Milford for over twenty years. We own every machine we place and we fix them ourselves. Same family, same trucks, the whole time.
Here’s how the company got here, and what that means for whoever ends up servicing your break room.
It starts with a bad job market and a gumball machine.
Early 2000s. Steve was working for the city of Roseville, California. His daughter was down in Las Vegas going job to job, having a hard time of it.
So he asked her the question that either changes a family or wrecks one. What about starting your own business?
She said what anybody says. She didn’t have the money.
And here’s the part that turned into a company:
“I’ll start something with you. I’ll invest and get it started, but you guys got to run it. I’m too busy.”
They both went off and researched it. What they landed on was the little gumball machines. Steve put in $30,000, they bought a pile of machines, and his daughter and her husband went out and placed them all over Las Vegas.
The machines paid the whole thing back inside of six months.
“Within six months my investment would pay it off. Just off the little gumball machines.”
That’s when the plan got bigger, and I love how he describes the moment:
“I’m going, wow. There’s got to be more to this than I’m thinking here.”
There was.
Those gumball routes had good locations, and good locations kept asking for things a gumball machine can’t do. So Steve went looking for somebody to teach him the real equipment.
He called Pepsi first. Pepsi wouldn’t talk to him.
Then he called Coca-Cola in Cedar City. They would. Turned out they ran an actual referral program for vendors.
“Pepsi wouldn’t talk to me. Coca-Cola does referrals for vendors. So we got with Coca-Cola and they taught us all about the big machines, and they gave us a real good start.”
Somebody else trained them on snack machines after that.
So that’s the whole origin. Not a franchise, not a business plan. One company picked up the phone and one didn’t.
By 2008 there were machines all over Las Vegas and the thing was working.
Then the recession hit, and the businesses those machines were sitting inside closed fast. Steve doesn’t dress it up:
“That was the first mistake that we made.”
They got out of Las Vegas completely and ate the loss. What was left was Utah. Mesquite, St. George, Hurricane, Cedar City, and all of Kanab.
Those Utah routes are the company that’s still here.
Through the 2010s they expanded again, out to Vernal and Moab and across the state, before figuring out that being spread that thin was its own problem. So they pulled back to the towns they could actually serve right.
Then COVID shut every single location they served. All at once.
Revenue didn’t dip. It fell off a cliff and stayed there.
“I could have just declared bankruptcy and quit altogether. A lot of times I thought maybe that’s what I should have done.”
He didn’t. They worked through it, and it was ugly.
“But no, we managed through it. It was tough. We got the debts all paid, got stuff rebuilt.”
And then he said the thing I wasn’t expecting:
“It really was the best thing, because we’re heading now in a completely different direction that we wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
Two things, and they’re both why the company looks the way it does now.
The machines quit holding cash. Every machine has taken cards since 2016. Before that, they were getting vandalized constantly, which never made any sense to Steve:
“Each machine didn’t have that much money in it. You’re not going to get very much. Unless you want a snack, I guess.”
High risk, low reward, and people kept doing it anyway. After the switch it mostly stopped. The hotel accounts are almost all card-only now, and the few still taking cash sit in secure spots and have never had a problem.
And the business moved toward micromarkets. This part is years back now, and it’s the reason micromarkets are the most practiced thing we do today. A warehouse operation came to us through a Coca-Cola referral. They were already buying drinks and handing them out free to their employees, and they wanted somebody else to run it. They wanted a coffee program too.
We’d never built a micromarket. Never done coffee either. So Steve told them that, before anything got signed:
“I was honest with them. I’ve never done one before, but I’ve always been interested in doing it. You’re going to have to understand we’re in the learning process here. We’re going to make mistakes and we’ll correct it.”
They said yes anyway. There were problems and both companies worked through them. That market has been running ever since, it’s the most stable part of the business, and every micromarket we’ve built since is built on what we learned in it. We’re not learning on your account. We already did that, on ours.
Not for the sentiment. Three of these are things you can actually use when you’re picking a provider.
We own the equipment outright. Bought, not leased from a bottler. That’s the reason a broken machine doesn’t sit in somebody else’s service queue, and it’s the first question worth asking anybody in this business. There’s a whole guide on why that one question tells you almost everything.
The routes are real. Nobody drew them on a map. They got built out from Cedar City and St. George into Richfield, Kanab, Beaver, and Milford over twenty years, one stop at a time.
This company has been broke and didn’t quit. Twice it got close enough to count. That’s not a marketing line. That’s the reason your machine will still be getting serviced in three years by the same people.
Steve handed off the day-to-day a while back. Ask him if running a vending company for twenty years counts as work and he’ll tell you:
“When I tell people, yeah, that’s all I do is play.”
He also spent two decades moving several hundred pounds of steel into a few hundred buildings to do it.
Straight answers
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