How innovation is saving Japan’s vending machine empire

TOKYO – On a scorching summer afternoon at the Yomiuri Land theme park in western Tokyo, sun-baked visitors seeking relief from the heat are tapping on the touchscreen panel of a newly installed vending machine.

Instead of chilled drinks, they are walking away with ultraviolet-blocking parasols and sunglasses from machines installed by fashion retailer Uniqlo just this July – the brand’s first domestic vending machines.

Across the country, such machines, Japan’s legendary jidohanbaiki, or jihanki for short, are morphing to keep up with changing consumer trends. In Osaka, train commuters can buy handheld cooling fans and cups of ice directly from platform units. At Odawara Station, travellers can now grab refrigerated bento boxes.

Vending machines regularly make headlines for dispensing a broadening array of items from frozen ramen, gyoza dumplings, caviar and gourmet meat to perfumes, puzzle games, trading cards, and even literature.

And on Aug 10, I bought a puzzle game set from a vending machine that I chanced upon at Yurakucho Station in Tokyo.

One beverage giant has gone so far as to turn its machines into climate-fighting tools while quenching thirsts.

As at June, Asahi Soft Drinks has deployed more than 8,500 eco-friendly vending machines packed with specialised carbon-absorbing materials. 

Asahi says each unit can absorb up to about 60kg of carbon dioxide per year from the surrounding air, matching the amount absorbed by 20 cedar trees naturally.

The company, the beverage subsidiary of Asahi Group, sees potential for a secondary business built around upcycling by selling the recovered absorbent material to construction companies. 

On Aug 5, Asahi said the recovered material had been used for the first time in cast-in-place concrete at a civil-engineering site. The concrete, developed by construction group Obayashi, was used in the foundation of a temporary building at an interim storage project in Fukushima prefecture.

This wave of creative reinvention comes as the traditional beverage vending machine, long the crown jewel of Japanese convenience and efficiency, is fighting a brutal economic battle.

For decades, these rectangular fixtures effectively turned train platforms, school lobbies, hospital corridors, factory floors and carparks into makeshift retail spaces. Machines perched near the wind-whipped summit of the 3,776m-tall Mount Fuji provide weary hikers with relief.

Yet in 2025, the total number of beverage vending machines in Japan slid to a historic low of 1.95 million units, slipping below the symbolic two million mark for the first time since records began 30 years ago, according to beverage research firm Inryo Soken. 

That marks a 20 per cent plunge from its 2014 peak of 2.47 million, with average sales volume per machine dropping by nearly 40 per cent.

This retreat has dragged down the broader industry landscape, with figures from the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association reflecting that the total network of all automated kiosks nationwide has thinned to 3.88 million units, down 22.9 per cent from 2014.

This includes, among other things, machines that dispense train tickets or meal tickets, as well as automatic service machines for parking payments or currency exchange.

“Japan’s status as a vending machine superpower is a thing of the past,” Sompo Institute Plus senior researcher Masato Koike wrote in a commentary in March.

The core problem is economic. The magic of the jihanki has, for decades, been pocket-change accessibility, but retail prices have been driven up by rising production and logistical costs.

In an era of prolonged inflation, price-conscious consumers are walking an extra few metres to the nearest konbini (convenience store), drugstore or supermarket, which have more pricing flexibility, given their bulk orders.

Koike noted how the decline of the beverage vending machine has coincided with the growth of the konbini, where consumers can buy a wider variety of items along the way. In 2025, there were 56,000 konbini nationwide, up from 50,860 in 2014.

Furthermore, while stores can adjust prices by single-yen increments to factor in the consumption tax of 8 per cent, vending machines face constraints that limit price adjustments to rigid 10-yen jumps.

Add cashless transaction fees for machines that offer such options – vendors take around a 2 per cent cut – and rising electricity costs, and the operating margins for vending machines erode dramatically.

There is also the labour cost. It is easy to forget that behind every automated box is an army of drivers navigating tight streets, hauling heavy crates, manually restocking slots, collecting coins, and clearing recycling bins. Amid Japan’s severe blue-collar labour shortage, this human footprint has grown increasingly costly.

The resulting financial fallout across the beverage sector has been severe. Industry titan Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Holdings recently took a massive 88.1 billion yen (S$708 million) loss largely tied to its vending assets in 2025.

Green tea giant Ito En, which suffered a 13.8 billion yen impairment loss on its machines, has slashed its total vending footprint to 75,000, less than half the 165,000 it had in 2015.

DyDo Group has pulled 20,000 unprofitable machines off the streets, while Pokka Sapporo has sold its entire network of 40,000 machines.

Faced with this squeeze, some beverage operators are rethinking the possibilities for their machines, as Asahi’s environmentally friendly initiative shows.

Realising it cannot compete solely on soft drinks, Suntory Beverage & Food is leaning into niche experiences by targeting “fan activity” (oshi-katsu) through pop culture collaborations.

Suntory plans to double its fleet of anime-adorned machines to 11,000 by 2028, outfitting them with dedicated slots for collectible acrylic figures and enamel pins.

Ultimately, the connection between the vending machines and the Japanese public is not merely transactional.

As Haruki Shizuka, a 65-year-old freelancer from Tokushima Prefecture, poetically wrote in a forum letter to the Asahi newspaper: “When returning home late at night, the vending machines scattered throughout the city were always a small haven of comfort.

“I have often felt encouraged by a drink, retrieved from an impersonal glowing machine standing in the darkness, as if it were saying, ‘You’ve worked hard today.’”

Their numbers may be thinning, but as long as the vending machine continues to adapt, evolve and surprise, I am hopeful that these glowing boxes will remain an indelible part of the Japanese landscape.