These S’poreans built a vending machine that makes cafe-style coffee—& it’s selling 23K cups/ mth
- ID
- 32927
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 07 Oct 2026, 5:29 PM
- Fetched
- 08 Oct 2026, 4:02 AM
- Provider
- Vulcan Post
- Category
- malaysia-startup
- Original URL
- https://vulcanpost.com/913366/flow-coffee-vending-machine/
- Source URL
- https://vulcanpost.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 2.0
- Created
- 08 Oct 2026, 4:02 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_startup_founders
What happened
Flow Coffee, founded by Wei Sheng Chang (29), Qingyuan Zhang (26), and Jacky Pu (26), runs 35 vending machines that dispense specialty coffee made with real Meiji milk and oat milk rather than powdered creamer, selling 23,000 cups a month and over 150,000 cups in just over a year. Chang conceived the idea in October 2023 while working full-time as a data scientist, sketching a machine with a milk-circuit cleaning system and an aroma-release mechanism, then flew to China alone to find a manufacturer after pitching partners across Japan, Korea, Taiwan and India. The piece is tagged as sponsored by Vulcan Post.
Why it matters
This is a sponsored profile with almost no technical or product detail you can act on. The one concrete number worth extracting is unit economics: 23,000 cups across 35 machines is roughly 660 cups per machine per month, or about 22 cups a day per unit — a useful benchmark if you are evaluating hardware-plus-F&B vending, but there is nothing here about AI, agents, developer tooling, or Malaysia that changes a decision.
Discussion angle
Is ~22 cups/day per machine a viable vending unit economic, and does a sponsored founder profile like this tell you anything about the SEA hardware startup scene that a customer count does not?