New report offers the first in-depth look into the performance of the European industry since the start of the pandemic

The EVA is pleased to announce the publication of its new market report on the European vending and Office Coffee Service (OCS) industry.

While the report reveals the current and latest trends with data up to the end of 2020, it naturally has to be read in context of the lockdowns and extreme limitations placed on businesses last year. For the first time the significant hit to both vends and revenue last year has been quantified across Europe, while other developments demonstrate continuing technology trends as well as an acceleration in the roll out of certain new innovations, including micromarkets and various payment solutions.

This year, the report has been expanded in terms of the inclusion of two additional markets, namely Finland and Norway, bringing the total markets covered to 24. These two countries complement the Swedish and Danish market reports and complete a detailed analysis of the sought-after Nordic region.

From a high-level point of view, the report reveals the following developments:

  • There are now 4.4m vending machines across Europe, delivering 25.4 billion vends annually.
  • Total 2020 revenue reduced 31% from 2019 to €12.3 billion.
  • The Italian market again counts the largest fieldbase with over 800,000 machines.
  • The overall vending machine penetration across Europe is about 200 people per machine. The Netherlands has the highest rate (with only 55 people for every machine), with Turkey having the lowest (1,890).
  • The German market revenue is €2.53 billion, a decrease of 20% from 2019, but still the largest market by revenue.
  • Hot drinks machines make up 96% of total vends in Norway and 94% in Finland
  • Despite revenue losses due to Covid of 14%, the underlying trends in Poland remain remarkably positive with continued significant investment in new machines (fieldbase increase of 10% in 2020).

This edition of the EVA Market Report starts a new and more efficient categorisation of markets into a tiered system, where the largest markets (previously the ‘big six’) are known as Tier 1, and other countries are organised as appropriate into Tiers 2, 3 and 4 depending on the size of that market.  The report furthermore sees for the first time the inclusion of the Coffee-to-go segment in the United Kingdom national report, where the concept is strongest and already well established. As of next year, statistics on this promising segment will be rolled out to the other markets.

The full study consists of a European report outlining the continent-wide trends and developments containing a total of 179 pages, with 24 individual national reports containing each 22 pages of data.

As always, EVA members have free access to all the reports and can request it directly via the EVA secretariat.

Anyone interested in purchasing or acquiring the report should contact the EVA at vending@vending-europe.eu