The spirit of the Automat lives on in Farmer’s Fridge, a vending machine holding grab-and-go sandwiches, salads, layered bowls and breakfast items, freshly made and delivered daily. The entrepreneur Luke Saunders started the company after years as a traveling salesman in the Midwest, where he said his only eating options were fast-food chains. Customers select and pay for the attractive, tasty food with a touch screen, and the average price for an item is $7. His base of operations is Chicago, where there’s a spacious kitchen from which the prepared food is shipped out at night to cities including Milwaukee and New York, and stocked in the refrigerators in the morning. After having installed hundreds of them in offices and institutions like hospitals, he is starting to place them in public locations, like building lobbies, and expects to have 100 in Manhattan and New Jersey by the end of the year.
Farmer’s Fridge, 420 Lexington Avenue (44th Street), 225 Broadway (Vesey Street), farmersfridge.com.
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