Crane’s new coffee range brings the unattended retail experience to traditional vending, across the UK and Europe.
Imagine you’re mid-transit – racing between client meetings or exploring a new city – when that caffeine craving hits. Usually, you’re stuck scanning the horizon for a café, settling for whatever chain or barista you happen to stumble upon. But what if the next premium coffee experience wasn’t miles away, but right where you’re standing? We’ve officially flipped the script: your local street corner, office lobby, or train platform can now host a world-class coffee outlet, all in a footprint smaller than your desk.
Crane Convenience, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of vending and coffee machines, has announced the launch of its next-generation coffee range across the UK and Europe. Built around design, connectivity, and everyday performance, the new range is aimed at modernising both the customer experience and how vending operators run their fleets.
It’s a genuinely impressive range. A contemporary coffee-bar design, native connectivity, an integrated aroma diffuser, and a retrofit door architecture that lets operators upgrade their existing machines without replacing the whole cabinet. Crane’s product team has described the goal as building on what the company is already known for – reliability, ease of use, and ease of service – and then pushing further into experiences that feel as strong in premium and retail settings as they do in everyday ones.
What we’re particularly excited about
This new range brings VendLive to traditional vending equipment. Put simply, VendLive is Boost inc’s software platform which gives a vending machine the same tools an online shop has: adverts on screen, live discounts, and the ability for operators to change prices or menus instantly from a laptop, without ever touching the machine itself. Three years in the making, and it’s a genuine step change: the dynamic pricing, live promotions, loyalty and real-time visibility that used to be reserved for branded to-go concepts like Costa Express or Starbucks To Go are now accessible to everyone, — any café, forecourt or workplace, not just the big flagship chains.
That’s not just the software running behind the scenes. VendLive also designed the actual screen and ordering journey customers tap through — built around the same Engage → Hook → Convert → Enjoy approach Boost inc uses across its other self-service deployments, adapted here for a hot beverage experience: browse, customise, pay, collect. Operators get:
- Custom UI themes: colours, logo and layout changed in a few clicks, no hardware changes needed
- Media and advertising: full-screen content between transactions, scheduled and updated remotely across an estate
- Promotions and vouchers: time-limited offers and bundles pushed live in seconds, redeemable by QR or code
- Dynamic pricing: instant price changes across some or all machines, supporting day-part pricing and expiry-driven discounts
- Loyalty and gamification: points, rewards, and small interactive moments built natively into the ordering journey
- Real-time visibility: diagnostics, stock levels and performance data available remotely, machine by machine
It’s not just the platform underneath — the interface itself is Boost inc’s, built around the same Engage → Hook → Convert → Enjoy journey used across Boost inc’s other unattended retail deployments, and adapted here for a hot beverage experience: browse, customise, pay, collect.
As Pascal Uffer, CEO and Co-founder of Boost inc, put it in the release:
“Smart coffee machines have existed for years, but generally only in the big flagship chains. Crane and Boost are bringing that to everyone else. The COTI2 pairs Crane’s engineering with our VendLive platform, so any café, forecourt or workplace, not just the premium brands, can offer the same dynamic pricing, live promotions and real-time visibility that used to be out of reach. That’s not an add-on. That’s how we think unattended coffee should work.”
We’re proud that a leading OEM like Crane chose VendLive as the technology partner for this range.
Learn more
Crane’s new coffee range is launching now across the UK and Europe.
For sales enquiries, please get in touch with the team at Crane Convenience directly or connect with our Boost inc team to find out more.
