Jaime Ibanez is on his way to becoming the vending machine king of Texas, or so he hopes.
The 21-year-old YouTuber and entrepreneur’s forte is selling snacks and sharing his business practices with his 481,000 YouTube subscribers and 20,000 Instagram followers. It all began at South Hills High School in Fort Worth, when he bought Lay’s chips in bulk and sold them to friends at a profit.
After graduating in June 2018, he initially considered pursuing a real estate license until he “ran into the vending industry” later that summer.
“I didn’t know anybody could own a vending machine. I thought it was just Coke or Dr Pepper, the big companies,” Ibanez said. “But I found out that anybody could buy a machine, put it at a business and start making money.”
The Fort Worth resident bought his first machine three months after high school in August 2018 for $3,000. Only 18 at the time, he had to use nearly all of his savings to buy it. The machine was an attractive buy, though, because it was already in place at a local business.
But just a few days later, the business owner told Ibanez to remove it. He had less than a week and no prospects for new locations.
“For the next couple of days, I sat in my room for hours. I called probably 100 different businesses,” he said. “On my second day, I found one — it was a barbershop, maybe 15 minutes from where I live.”
His business, Vending Bites, was born, and Ibanez still has that barbershop in his vending portfolio. Four months later, he bought a three-location vending route with eight machines. Ibanez still considers that deal a “steal.”
It cost him $4,000, half of which came from friends and family to supplement his savings. Ibanez estimates it can take up to a year to earn back an initial investment on some machines, but this route was routinely pulling in $1,200 a month. He was in the black in fewer than five months.
Three short and hectic years later, Ibanez now owns 37 vending machines across North Texas. From vending alone, he said, his monthly sales run between $12,000 and $13,000, with a 45% profit margin after accounting for the cost of gas and snacks.
Day in the life
Ibanez first put the story of his vending business online in January 2019 in a day-in-the-life YouTube video. The video captured Ibanez restocking vending machines and retrieving money — an inauspicious beginning that Ibanez said hit a million views in less than a month.
His online presence grew quickly, and he reached 100,000 YouTube subscribers in just a few months. He said he “always liked being in front of a camera” and was eager to mix his comfort on camera with what he was learning about running a business.
“I’ve made pretty much every video I can think of about vending, [but] people still love to see the collection videos. They still want to see how much machines are making,” he said. “I do always try to do something a little bit different.”
Ibanez’s 129 videos have been viewed more than 57 million times, and his engaging personality comes across in his videos. He likes to tell personal stories with his girlfriend Lizbeth Galvan and share his experiences as he imparts business lessons along the way.
“I’ve always thought about who exactly is watching my videos. Is it people that want to start a vending machine business, or is it people that just look at it for entertainment?” Ibanez said. “It is mainly branding myself because a majority of people do watch just the videos because of the entertainment I mix it with.”
Ibanez posts one to two times a month — output he wants to ramp up because it could boost his revenue from YouTube.
In the early days, Ibanez said, YouTube content about the vending business was more profitable than the machines themselves. His YouTube revenue now ranges between $5,000 and $10,000 a month.
His creative process is completely intuitive, with little to no planning involved. Ibanez said he often takes his camera along with him while stocking vending machines or shopping for bulk snacks. He also looks for unique vending machines to feature, such as ones that dispense freshly squeezed orange juice or a Skittles machine where you can pick your favorite flavor.
“I have thought about if I want to make different types of content, since I feel like vending is getting kind of repetitive now,” he said. “In the future, I’ll probably branch out into making other types of business financial videos.”
Importing success
In 2021, Ibanez took time to focus primarily on upkeep. But he also spent the year developing Exotic World, an online business that sells unique snacks from around the globe.
“It’s all brands that you know, like Oreo, Fanta, KitKat, but in other countries like Japan, Australia. They make flavors that the USA doesn’t,” Ibanez said.
Eccentric items in his online store include spicy Korean ramen-flavored Lay’s chips, melon-flavored KitKats and yogurt-flavored Fanta. His store also sells mystery boxes at three different prices and offers curated surprise selections that change monthly.
He markets this business on Instagram and TikTok and has drawn in 11,700 more Instagram followers and 137,000 TikTok followers to add to his social media presence. According to Ibanez, this business is the most profitable out of all of his sources of income. Ibanez said he averages between $10,000 and $15,000 each month from Exotic World snack sales, and takes in 30% of that as profit.
“It does way better than vending … which is crazy to think about, but vending is more consistent,” he said. Vending has “the same amount of sales pretty much every single day compared to online sales, which one day can be really high and then the next day really low.”
Filling the gap
As he began researching the vending industry, Ibanez soon recognized there are few resources for aspiring owners.
“Three years ago, there was no information on how to get started,” Ibanez said. “I kind of just winged everything from the very beginning.”
For him, that meant getting his business license and permits, establishing his LLC and learning about how to source and repair vending machines on his own. As he expanded, he found resources and fellow vending professionals to assist him when challenges arose, whether from a broken part or trouble finding locations to place a vending machine.
“To this day, I get a lot of messages. People want to get into vending but don’t really know how to find locations,” said Ibanez, who often targets warehouses and offices with large staffs. “That’s the hardest part in this business — finding a location for your machine.”
On YouTube, Ibanez sees his videos as filling the information gap he encountered when he started because he offers tips on generating sales or sourcing vending machines.
For his most entrepreneurial followers, Ibanez created a Teachable course, a step-by-step guide for starting a vending business. He charges $147 for it.
“I basically gathered everything I knew over the last three years, put it in that one course and a lot of people have enjoyed it. It’s everything from what permits you need to get your first machine locations,” Ibanez said. “This course is for anybody that wants to take it seriously because it has literally everything you could possibly think of when starting” a vending business.
What’s his biggest takeaway? It takes persistence to succeed in the vending business, Ibanez said.
“A lot of people give up so easily. They buy a machine, they put it in their garage, fill it up with snacks from the very beginning to get them motivated and see how it’s going to look. Then they try finding a location for maybe a month or two. [When] they can’t, they end up selling the machine,” he said.
For those ready to take the plunge, Ibanez also partners with Vending.com, a factory-direct vending machine supplier that distributes his favorite brand of machines, Wittern. The partnership enabled Ibanez to offer his audience a referral code for a discount on an initial purchase. He collected $1,500 in referral fees in the first month from purchases that used his code.
Texas takeover
Ibanez and his girlfriend are a two-person team running all three aspects of the business. Galvan handles the vending routes while Ibanez manages the online snack business and content production for social media. They want to expand their team in the near future.
“I feel like I’m stuck right now. I can’t really grow because I’m just so busy with running everything,” he said. “That’s another reason why right now I can’t really post that often on YouTube. My viewers get mad at me.”
Despite the limitations of their small team, Ibanez has big expansion goals. He wants to begin sharing Vending Bites videos on TikTok soon while he continues to add at least one new vending location each month for the rest of 2022.
“I want to take over my city; I want to be the No. 1 vending company here,” he said. “The end goal is just as big as I can get it. I can see myself having a big warehouse and multiple route drivers.”
And Ibanez isn’t worried about longevity in the vending business.
“I honestly think it will be around even for my lifetime, who knows about hundreds of years down the road. People are always going to want snacks, people are always going to want drinks,” he said. “I just can’t see [businesses] spending their own time having to go out and buy snacks for their employees. They’re always going to outsource it to a vending company.”
