Operations
Throughput
Term from the vending glossary
Number of vends from a machine per time unit — hour, day or month. Essential for machine category selection (hot beverages: 80–150 cups/hour for office machines, 200+ for high-performance machines) and for cost-effectiveness analysis. Excessive throughput for an undersized machine causes continuous duty and premature wear.
Throughput describes how many units a machine can dispense in a given period without exceeding its technical limits. For hot beverage machines, reheating capacity is the limiting factor; for snack machines, the dispensing mechanism; for refrigerated machines, cool-down time after each door opening.
In quotations, specifications typically show a best value under ideal conditions. The metric becomes meaningful only in relation to the site's load profile: break times, shift changes, events. A machine whose throughput is exactly matched to average demand will regularly operate too slowly in practice.