A focus on micro markets, fresh food, and strong customer service help Buffalo Strive thrive
Each morning when Jen Corto drives up to the parking lot of Buffalo Strive Vending in Orchard Park, N.Y., she has a feeling of disbelief. It’s surreal for her to see that the vending company she and her husband, Jon, started in 2011 has grown into a 40,000-square-foot warehouse space; that the dozens of vehicles in the parking lot belong to the 70 people now working there; and that the fleet of 20 delivery trucks belongs to Buffalo Strive Vending and carries products to customers each day.
In just 13 years, Buffalo Strive Vending has grown from about $170,000 in 2012 to $16 million in annual revenue — all through its embrace of micro markets, a focus on fresh food and a relentless pursuit to serve others.
From football to vending
Jon and Jen Corto got their start in the vending industry rather unexpectedly. The couple, from Orchard Park, N.Y., had been succeeding in their respective careers: Jen as a certified public accountant. and Jon as a safety for the Buffalo Bills football team. In his role as a professional football player, Jon was involved in the NFL Play 60 initiative, which encourages kids to be physically active for at least 60 minutes per day. He would travel to schools and talk to children about how to make healthy food choices.
But then he noticed something contradictory — the school vending machines did not offer healthy options to kids. “We couldn’t believe there weren’t healthy food choices in the vending machines, so we started talking about how we could change that,” said Jen. The duo went to their alma mater and presented the idea to place six vending machines with healthier options. In March of 2011, Buffalo Strive Vending was born.
The pair continued to work their full-time jobs while Jen took training and education classes to learn how to stock, repair and refill the company’s vending machines. The following year, Jon left the NFL, Jen left her job and they decided to grow their vending business. Over the years, Buffalo Strive Vending has expanded from just six to more than 350 vending machines, primarily growing through word-of-mouth. One of its biggest growth areas, however, has been the company’s introduction into and expansion of micro markets.
Micro markets and technology
Several years after launching their vending business, Jen and Jon learned about micro markets at a NAMA show and knew it was a segment they needed to enter. “The micro market is the perfect solution for businesses that want more than vending but aren’t big enough for onsite food service,” said Jen.
Buffalo Strive began targeting that side of the business and presenting the micro market concept to current and potential clients. “People just love micro markets,” added Jen. The company began working with 365 Retail Markets from the beginning, which Jen says has been a valuable partnership. “We do all of our micro market, equipment and software kiosks through them.”
Jen and Jon particularly like the fact that the 365 Connected Campus allows customers to stay connected on one system. “We can offer an all-inclusive food and beverage program through one software, one system and one market card, which has allowed us to be this one-stop-shop for some of our larger customers,” said Jen. This technology offering not only appeals to customers, but it is also important to the advancement of the industry, the Cortos believe. “Vending companies can’t stay stagnant in this industry, because someone will step in with something bigger and better, so you’ve got to stay up on the technology,” Jen said.
Buffalo Strive began using Lightspeed Automation early on, which helped transform the warehouse by streamlining operations. They also integrated VendSys vending management software in 2015 to bring the company’s data into one convenient place. Both Lightspeed and VendSys have allowed Buffalo Strive to grow and expand. When she thinks about how she picked routes in the early days, Jen laughs. “I think we started with technology that pulled up one route at a time and you could print a packing slip,” she said. “That’s so different from today where everything connects. All of the technology talks to each other now. It's amazing. I think without technology in this industry you’re not moving forward,” she added.
Technology has been important to Buffalo Strive since the beginning because they have always wanted to give customers multiple ways to pay. “We wanted to do vending in a new light, with innovation and technology,” Jen said. Since 2011, the company has offered credit card readers on every machine and has included other forms of digital payments as they’ve become available. “Jon goes to the NAMA Show every year to see what’s out there and to see how we can do things better, bigger, and how can we ‘wow’ people with the newest technology out there,” Jen added.
One of the newest technological additions to the company has been the integration of ZippyAssist, which allows operators to provide immediate refunds to customers. A form of artificial intelligence (AI), ZippyAssist automates customer service by sending a customer complaint or product request directly to a customer service email. If a customer needs a refund, the technology will automatically send the refund via Venmo, saving the vending company time and money. “It has been a huge gamechanger for us,” said Jen. “The customers no longer have to call us and go through prompts and wait days for a refund. Now they get a refund in seconds. ZippyAssist has automated the entire process.”
Although ZippyAssist is the first AI technology Buffalo Strive has integrated, it has a company goal to incorporate more of these automated systems into operations in the next year or two. “People want things done faster and more efficiently,” Jen continued. “The more automated we can make things without losing that service component is huge and customer service is a big area AI can help, whether that’s answering phones or connecting to service technicians.”
Micro markets lead to a focus on fresh food
As the company’s micro market segment continued to grow, Buffalo Strive found itself expanding into another unexpected area: fresh food.
Fresh food sales in its micro markets continued to be a hit with customers, so the Buffalo Strive team thought about ways in which they could provide the fresh food themselves. “Customers can tell when a sandwich is frozen, thawed and put in a cooler, and it doesn’t taste as good as one made fresh that morning,” said Jen.
The company decided to invest in fresh food and started by hiring several chefs and opening an offsite space where they could prepare fresh food for their micro markets. In the last several years, the kitchen has moved into a large onsite commissary in the company’s 40,000-square-foot facility. “What sets us apart from our competitors is our fresh food and how we make it every day,” said Jen. “Our bakers and chefs are constantly coming up with new ideas and rotating menus. When we go to sell a micro market to a customer, we bring our fresh food to every meeting, that’s what makes us different.”
She notes that while the snack rack in most micro markets is going to look the same, the Buffalo Strive fresh food coolers are going to be vastly different.
The company’s commissary has been so successful that they have had outside businesses asking to buy and sell their products in other markets. Beyond vending and micro markets, Buffalo Strive is now working on creating a wholesale fresh food division to sell its food to other channels that are not current customers such as airports, convenience stores and gas stations. “It's a new venture for us, so we can do more with our commissary,” said Jen. In 2024, the company hopes to become USDA certified.
Buffalo Strive wins prestigious foodservice award
In early 2024, Jon and Jen Corto of Buffalo Strive Vending received the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association (IFMA) Silver Plate Award, which recognizes professionals who have demonstrated extraordinary food service leadership, and who have made impactful contributions to the advancement of the industry. Of the eight food-away-from-home categories, Buffalo Strive won in the Grocery, Convenience, & Specialty Retail category. The award ceremony took place on May 18, 2024, in Chicago.
Success based on service
Over the last 13 years, Buffalo Strive has seen an immense amount of growth. Despite this growth, the company has never lost sight of its main focus: its customers. “We thrive on service, so during the moments when we felt like we were losing that component, that’s when we would realize we needed more help,” said Jen. “Being a local family-owned business, we have always wanted to be that company where customers are immediately getting the service they need.”
Customer service is so important to the company that they wanted to include it in their name. As they were brainstorming names early on, the Cortos kept coming back to the word “strive.” “I think that word embodies who we are,” said Jen. “We have a ‘whatever it takes’ mentality. We will do whatever it takes to give our customers what they’re looking for.”
COVID comeback
As with many other vending operations, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Buffalo Strive Vending hard. The company had just closed on its new facility when it had to lay off all but four of its 22 employees at the time. “We had to figure out what we could do to keep ourselves alive and running,” said Jen.
Rather than hunkering down to survive the storm, the Cortos got to work. They reached out to hospitals and began providing meals, snacks and snack boxes to frontline workers. “We [as a business] found ways to get through COVID, and we came out stronger than before,” said Jen. Once businesses began requiring more employees to return to work, Buffalo Strive was able to bring back many of the employees it had laid off during the early days of the pandemic. Since then, it has more than doubled its number of employees.
As the company has grown, it has gotten better at knowing when to bring on more staff. As the clientele increases, Buffalo Strive has had to hire more drivers and warehouse packers. For every five to 10 employees, the company has hired personnel to manage the workers. Today, the company has an operations manager, warehouse manager, and commissary manager, to name a few positions. “Our mantra is A relentless pursuit to serve others,” said Jen. “We have that tagline hanging in our facility, and that’s what we represent and live by.”
Despite receiving requests for service from outside its service area, Buffalo Strive is not ready to expand its radius quite yet. “We thrive on our food and service, and if we go too far outside of our current service area, we would lose those components, and that just takes away from who we are,” said Jen.
Going forward, Buffalo Strive has brought on a salesperson to pursue more local locations, and the company is preparing for even more growth in the coming year. “It’s crazy to see that 13 years ago, we started in this small little office space, and today we are in a huge warehouse and we are bursting. It’s surreal to see how much we’ve grown,” Jen reflected.
Currently, the company has more than 350 vending machines, 80 micro markets, 70 employees and 11 routes, all built from the ground up. “We didn’t come from this industry,” Jen added. “We just started with an idea and have worked hard and watched it grow to what it is today.”
Adrienne Klein | Contributing Editor
Adrienne Zimmer Klein is a freelance writer with a background in the vending, micro market and office coffee service industry. She worked as an associate editor and managing editor at Automatic Merchandiser and VendingMarketWatch.com from 2013 until 2017. She is a regular contributing writer at Automatic Merchandiser.
