Chicagoland entrepreneur Tianna Gawlak has been able to pursue her lifelong dream to own a retail bakery, a vision made possible by self-service technology.
Image courtesy of The Bakery Box.
Aug. 31, 2022 | by Elliot Maras — Editor, Kiosk Marketplace & Vending Times
Dedicated food vending machines have suffered a bad rap in the convenience services industry, historically speaking.
Innovators have come up with dedicated food machines over the years, such as French fry, pizza and popcorn machines, only to have vending operators reject them, time and again. Such machines rarely made sense for operators tasked with serving a variety of food and refreshments in limited work spaces.
But the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have given new life to some of these long rejected concepts. All of a sudden, restaurants and retailers found vending — including machines dedicated to a particular item or category — a great way to make food available 24/7 in an unattended location.
The Bakery Box, a colorful bakery vending machine in Chicago's fashionable River North neighborhood, offers a perfect example of this emerging food vending concept.
The glass-front machine, built into a Michigan Avenue storefront, offers freshly baked mini cakes and macarons, with a seating area where passersby can indulge themselves in flavors such as strawberry milkshake, caramel, almond, hazelnut, cannoli and more.
The machine usually sells out daily, much to the delight of Tianna Gawlak, a late-twenties entrepreneur.
Gawlak, a Chicago area native, doesn't doubt that COVID-19 made retail property owners receptive to her "24-hour cake ATM" concept when she approached them with it in 2020. But her inspiration was driven by her life-long love of desserts.
"I've always felt drawn to desserts and food," Gawlak told Vending Times in a phone interview.
Like many young people, her career aspirations led her in different directions. She earned a master's degree in health administration and also became an accomplished children's book author.
But her entrepreneurial itch to own her own bakery never wavered.
In the fall of 2020, she was scouting locations for a bakery in the Burr Ridge Village Center in Burr Ridge, Illinois when she came across a nook in a wall next to Starbucks just big enough to fit a vending machine.
"Something just kind of clicked there that I could use some sort of machine," Gawlak said. "I wasn't sure at the time if it even existed." She had never seen a refrigerated vending machine.
"I went home and just started looking into it and sure enough I found that there are machines that would be the perfect dispensary of a cake or some kind of small refrigerated dessert."
She studied vending equipment and became convinced she could create a baked goods vending machine.
She approached the mall management and to he surprise, they liked the idea.
The mall did not have any store selling desserts, so she thinks this played in her favor, along with the fact that stores were closing due to COVID.
"Timing was helpful," she said.
Her first machine was a used refrigerated rotating carousel-style vending machine with 55 trays that didn't have a credit card reader, which she installed.
She signed a six-month lease for the mall space and hired a general contractor to install the machine.
She then set about looking for bakers who could provide packaged products that fit in the machine's trays.
Reaction to the idea from bakers was diverse, she said, but overall supportive.
"Everyone seemed to think it was pretty cool that you didn't have to go into a storefront bakery," she said.
She partnered with Lesucre Ltd. in Chicago for macarons and a wholesaler for mini cakes.
"It keeps everything very local for us to serve people who want to support Chicago based businesses," she said. "Everything is made fresh and delivered fresh every morning."
The macarons come three to a 2- by 4-inch box in the upper two rows of the machine while the mini cakes come in 4-square-inch boxes in the lower ones.
In the beginning she picked up the desserts from the bakers and packaged them in cardboard packages in a work area near the machine.
She soon hired a part time employee to do the packaging.
Gawlak had no idea how to price the products. She came up with the prices — $6.25 for the macarons and $7.50 for the mini cakes — based on product cost, rent and estimated labor expense.
"It was kind of a shot in the dark," she said.
The first day the machine sold out in less than six hours. In the evening she restocked it and it sold out again that same night. Ninety-percent of the sales were paid with credit cards.
"It took off right away," she said. "We've just been rolling with it and learning as we go. There's really nothing like that around us."
After six months, the bakers agreed to deliver the products to her packaging facility.
The menu does not change often. She did some seasonal things like chocolate covered strawberries for Valentine's Day, gingerbread cookies for holidays, but the regular offerings are always popular.
"No one product specifically does better or worse over a six-month trend," she said. "Everything just seems to just to depend on the person who's walking by."
By December, she put a down payment on a second machine.
"I knew right away that I wanted to expand on the concept, get things going, and use a newer, higher technology version," she said.
She came across a Singapore vending machine manufacturer, TCN, which features an elevator delivery mechanism and a Nayax payment device with a dashboard that provides real time transaction tracking, enabling Gawlak to monitor sales remotely.
"It's kind of a game changer for me to be able to tell how many transactions were happening, versus with that first machine," she said. "I really had no idea until the next day."
TCN customized the machine to her specs. She explained she wanted a pink exterior and temperature control to meet Chicago food regulations. She also adjusted the delivery elevator to prevent product from dropping.
It took five months for the new machine to arrive from TCN in Singapore, which was a lot longer than expected.
The leasing agent for the River North storefront property in downtown Chicago was also receptive to having a cake machine accessible from the sidewalk. That second location opened June 2021 — less than a year after the first location.
The rent was higher than in Burr Ridge, but Gawlak kept the same prices.
The second machine sold out the day it opened and did so nightly for the first three months.
On weekends, everything sells out in a few hours. During the week it slows a little.
Gawlak promotes her wares on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, and she has not done any paid advertising. Chicago Bucket Listers and Chicago Best Dates, a pair of local activities websites, posted videos of the machine.
"Our social media kind of blew up from there; I went from 100 followers to like 5,000 in one night from these videos," she said.
Vandalism has not been an issue, which she credits to the high visibility locations and 24-hour security.
Nor have there been many technical issues. A cake box will sometimes fall onto the tray weirdly and the machine has to be reset.
Gawlak has invested much of her profit in expansion. The next order is for three machines. She already has one location ready to go.
Long term, she plans to have machines throughout Illinois. She thinks she will be able to open two locations a year.
She will add employees as she expands. One part-time employee is needed for each machine.
Gawlak's biggest surprise has been how fast the products sell.
She is glad she has been able to pursue her lifelong dream to own a retail bakery, a vision made possible by self-service technology.
Photos courtesy of The Bakery Box.
Elliot Maras is the editor of Kiosk Marketplace and Vending Times. He brings three decades covering unattended retail and commercial foodservice.
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