From hot pies to ready-made meals: rethinking food vending

When WM Robotics launched pie-vending machine PieBot in 2023, founders Sasha Mates and Vincent Wong were focused on a very specific value proposition. They wanted to make hot pies available in places where there was demand for food, but not necessarily the foot traffic or trading hours to support a staffed counter.

The product has since expanded across Auckland, including a pie vending machine in the Faculty of Engineering and Design where they studied, and into other parts of New Zealand.

Vincent says, “We’ve partnered with some awesome companies such as Auckland Transport and brought convenience right to our customers at major Auckland transit hubs.”

Sasha and Vincent are now building their company around the economics that made PieBot viable in the first place.

Retail labour is expensive. At the same time, there are workplaces, apartment buildings, hotels and transport hubs where people want a meal outside the hours, or below the volumes, that make conventional food retail practical.

WM Robotics is betting that self-service technology can fill some of that gap.

The company has adapted the technology developed for PieBot to handle chilled and frozen products and is forming partnerships with larger food businesses. Its most recent move is a pilot with My Food Bag, selling the company’s ready-made meals from machines in workplaces, hotels and apartment buildings.

My Food Bag chief executive Mark Winter has said that the pilot is part of the company’s effort to reach new customers and explore different sales channels.

“Early results validate the demand for our convenient and healthy ready-made meals,” he said in a recent investor update.

For Sasha, the opportunity lies partly in updating an old retail format.

“Vending in New Zealand has always meant chips and chocolate bars. In today’s age, there are people who expect high-quality healthy meals, available whenever they want them,” he says.

The shift into ready-made meals is notable for a business that grew out of an encounter with an automated noodle machine.

Sasha and Vincent met while studying engineering at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. The idea that eventually became PieBot came later, when a late-night arrival at a San Francisco hotel left an automated noodle machine as one of the few available options for food. Back in Auckland, they began looking at whether a similar model could work here. Pies, a product they were already buying regularly from a local bakery, provided the starting point.

It was not their first attempt at building something.

As students, Sasha and Vincent took several ideas through Velocity, the entrepreneurship development programme delivered by the University’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). Some of those ideas went nowhere. What remained useful was their business partnership and the experience of putting assumptions in front of other people and finding out where they did not hold up.

That distinction between an idea that sounds plausible and one that survives contact with customers still shapes how they operate.  

It is a lesson with consequences beyond product design. As WM Robotics has grown, Sasha and Vincent say one of the harder changes has been moving from doing the work themselves to building the systems and team that allow the company to operate without them at the centre of every decision.

The next phase will test how far the model can travel. WM Robotics is continuing to add locations around New Zealand and deepen its partnerships, while developing new self-service technology that the founders say has been several years in the making.