This started as a complaint.

The test

The bar is simple and it isn't negotiable: would I be happy handing this to my own kids? If the answer is no, it doesn't go on the shelf. Not at a better margin, not as a filler item, not because it sells.

Everything in a Nourish machine has to be a net benefit to the body of the person who buys it. That's a narrower list than most operators would accept, and it means turning down products that would move well. It also means the things that are in there can be described honestly — where they grew, who processed them, what was done to them — because there's nothing to talk around.

Unattended retail has spent decades racing to the bottom: cheapest input, longest shelf life, brightest wrapper. There's no rule saying it has to work that way. This is the same idea pointed in the opposite direction.

Who's behind it

Nourish is run by Aaron Davison, who has spent decades designing and maintaining connected systems for residential and commercial clients — the kind of work where a device in a house on one island has to be diagnosed from another. That background is why this venture takes the shape it does.

Because the second problem with vending is that nobody is watching. A machine that tells you it's low on oat milk on a Thursday afternoon is a different business from one you find empty on Saturday. Good product on the shelf only counts if the shelf is actually stocked and the cooler is actually cold.

The platform

Every machine we install reports to one system: stock levels, sales by item, cleaning cycles, faults, temperature. It's built to be hardware-agnostic on purpose — coffee equipment and coolers come from different manufacturers speaking different protocols, and all of it sits behind one common interface.

That's a deliberate constraint rather than an accident. A platform that only works with one vendor's hardware is a dead end. One that treats every machine the same way can grow into rooms and sites that don't exist yet.

Where this goes

The first installation is a wellness property on Bowen Island. The next horizon is the North Shore and the Sea to Sky corridor, where hospitality and recreation venues have the same after-hours gap and considerably more of it. Beyond that, the monitoring platform is the durable asset — designed from the first line of code to run more than one operator's machines.

Get in touch

If you run a space, want to know what's in a machine, or want to talk about what comes after Bowen — the door's open.

hello@nourishprovisions.com