CONSUMER-ORIENTED PRODUCT ASSORTMENT AND VENDINGMACHINE BUSINESS DESIGN: A LEARNING FACTORY PROJECT

Abstract

This article presents a Learning Factory project that designed a vending machine business around consumer needs, product assortment, customer experience, and marketing communication. The project used a questionnaire to identify daily product needs, preferred package sizes, and purchase tendencies among internship participants, followed by spreadsheet-based data processing and product selection. The selected categories covered personal care, household cleaning, oral care, minor health products, vitamins, beverages, snacks, and seasonings. The project then translated the estimated demand into inventory quantities, vending-machine slot allocation, pricing assumptions, cash-flow projections, promotional mechanisms, and customer-feedback procedures. Two intended vending machine locations were treated as Site A and Site B to avoid disclosing organizational identities. The project illustrates how consumer information can be connected with assortment and operational decisions in an automated retail setting. The approach is consistent with recent vending-machine research showing that product assortment and portfolio decisions can be analyzed using transaction and demand information (Kumoro et al., 2026). However, the present project is a feasibility and learning design rather than an evaluation of realized transaction outcomes.