Morton’s Milk and Dairy Farm shop, based in the rural parish of Ochiltree in Ayrshire, is owned and run by David and Gillian Morton on the farm where they have approximately 800 cattle of various ages and milk 300 Dairy Cows. Mr and Mrs Morton’s business consists of selling their own delicious pasteurised whole and semi-skinned milk fresh out of their milk vending machine, a fully vending farm shop and a coffee house.
Gillian first seen Vending by JSR’s farm vending technology when she came across a Roesler machine based in ‘The Overgate’ Dundee. Which was selling potatoes and other vegetables at the time. After taking an interest in the product and doing some further research, they decided to purchase their own LockBlox vending machine to sit alongside their DF Italia milk vending machine. Opening their fully self-service farm shop. The reasoning why Mr and Mrs Morton decided to invest in farm vending was “due to the excellent presentation of products, it was all self-service so there was no staff needed and the extended opening times”.
Mr and Mrs Morton have achieved so much more with their LockBlox Vending Machine than they ever originally planned. Gillian said “It has (the LockBlox vending machine) allowed me to grow the machine (add on lockers), sell a wider range of produce then ever initially intended to and become a fully functioning farm shop”. This was all done to keep up with the growing customer base and grow the machine as the profits continued to grow. Gillian said “there was no plan to extend the machine or even diversify the product range originally. The original plan was to mainly sell the milk out of our milk machine and have the lockers as a secondary machine, complimenting the milk machine. However, that has now flipped, with the produce within the lockers being the best sellers for the business”. Gillian and David Morton are a great example of how you can scale the number of lockers in your machine to keep up with your growing customer base. Within 6 months of originally purchasing their LockBlox units, David and Gillian had doubled the size of their machine by purchasing more lockers to add onto their existing control terminal.
When asked what Morton’s Milk and Dairy Farm Shop customers thought of the vending machine, the response was that “They love it. They love that it is simple to use, futuristic, they get a real excitement when they’ve paid and the locker door pops open”. Gillian went onto explain that “they like the fact that the shop was always clean, especially through the pandemic” and thought it was a “great way of displaying products”.
David and Gillian have found the Vending Web an extremely useful tool when running their automated farm shop. There favourite functioning of the Vending Web is the live Transactions. “being able to see minute by minute transactions is great if a customer has any queries, you can see exactly what their transaction was by matching the sale with the time they were in the shop”. The vending web is great for “uploading new products and changing the products assigned to lockers”, “It’s just a very useful system in general”.
Gillian was asked about how helpful we hear at Vending by JSR have been for their business over the years. Gillian said that we “have been great”. “Very patient, knowledgeable and always willing to help. It is basically a 24/7 help service”. Gillian finished by saying she has recommended us to several others and would continue to do so.
If you would like to know more about Morton’s Milk and Dairy Farm Shop and see their vending set up, you can check out their website at https://mortonsmilk.co.uk/shop/ for more details. There you will find out more about their business and also see their entire product range.
If you are interested in how Morton’s Milk and Dairy have built a business out of a fully self-service vending farm shop, and think you can benefit from a similar set up? Then contact us through the website and we can arrange to have a call to discuss how a self-service locker vending machine may generate extra income for yourself.
