The uVending system needed a consumer experience model that would make the connected vending interaction genuinely engaging — not just technologically impressive. Without the right consumer experience design, the platform risked becoming a novelty rather than a scalable retail innovation.
Vivaldi designed the consumer experience platform for the uVending system — defining how consumers would interact with the touchscreen interface, what data would be captured to improve personalization, and how analytics could be used to optimize product mix and machine performance over time.
Positive pilot results validated the platform's consumer appeal and commercial potential. The analytics and data capture model generated licensing interest from major CPG players, confirming the uVending platform as a commercially viable innovation in connected retail.
Samsung and Coca-Cola partnered with Vivaldi to design the consumer experience platform for uVending, defining how consumers would interact with the touchscreen interface and how captured data would drive personalization, product mix optimization, and machine performance over time. Positive pilot results validated the experience model and the underlying analytics generated licensing interest from major CPG players, confirming the uVending platform as a commercially viable connected retail innovation.
Samsung Electronics is the world’s largest consumer electronics company by revenue, headquartered in Suwon, South Korea, with annual revenues exceeding $200 billion. The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company, operating in over 200 countries with annual revenues exceeding $45 billion. The Samsung-Coca-Cola uVending partnership combined connected device technology with beverage retail innovation to create a new consumer engagement platform.
Vivaldi designed the consumer experience platform for the uVending system, defining how consumers would interact with the touchscreen interface, what data would be captured to improve personalization, and how analytics would be used to optimize product mix and machine performance over time. Pilot results validated both consumer appeal and commercial potential, and the analytics model generated licensing interest from major CPG players.
The interaction was designed to be genuinely engaging rather than just technologically impressive, which meant every screen, gesture, and feedback moment had to earn the few seconds of attention a consumer gives a vending machine. Personalization signals from previous interactions and contextual data shaped what the consumer saw on the screen, which turned the machine into a responsive surface rather than a static product menu.
Connected hardware is replicable and gets commoditized quickly, while the data layer is what compounds value over time as more interactions accumulate. Captured interaction data drives personalization, dynamic merchandising, supply optimization, and category insights for the brands selling through the platform, all of which generate revenue and operational leverage that pure hardware never can, which is why the durable moat in connected retail lives in the analytics rather than the screen.
Licensing interest from major CPG players validated that uVending was a platform other brands wanted to build on rather than a one-off Samsung and Coca-Cola product, which is the difference between an innovation experiment and a category. CPG companies do not license technology unless the underlying consumer experience and data model deliver returns their own teams cannot replicate, so the licensing signal was effectively external proof that the platform’s strategic value was real.
