An Oliveira do Bairro Vending Firm Bets on Cups and Coffee to Hit €15 Million
vendinGO, a vending company from the Bairrada, has bought a paper-cup factory (Madil) and a coffee roaster (Caffier) for about €1.8 million, aiming to control its supply chain 'from the coffee to the cup' and lift turnover to €15 million by year-end while adding 20 qualified jobs.
A vending-machine company from Oliveira do Bairro, in the Bairrada region of central Portugal, is making an unusually bold bet for a firm its size: rather than simply buying the coffee and cups it sells through its machines, it now wants to make them itself. vendinGO, founded during the pandemic by Airton dos Santos Pedro and Gabriel Marques dos Santos, has bought a paper-cup factory and a coffee brand, and says the two deals should help lift its turnover to 15 million euros by the end of this year.
The company is a recent reinvention. It began life as Detalhe Alimentar, a food-distribution business, before rebranding as vendinGO in 2024. Today it supplies more than 350 products to over 300 operators of self-service machines, and holds exclusive distribution rights in that channel for several snack and drinks brands. The new acquisitions push it a step up the supply chain — from distributor to manufacturer.
The first purchase is Madil, a paper-cup factory in Santo Tirso, in the north of the country, capable of turning out around 720 cups a minute in the formats the vending sector relies on. The plant had been sitting idle, and vendinGO says it brought the unit back into production within three months of taking it over. The second is Caffier, a coffee brand and roaster acquired in the first quarter of the year, with the capacity to produce more than 960 tonnes of coffee annually. The Caffier deal also brought with it Multispresso, a line of capsules compatible with the main pod systems on the market, giving vendinGO a foothold in the retail segment alongside its vending business.
Together the two industrial acquisitions represent an investment of about 1.8 million euros. The logic is vertical integration: controlling the whole chain, in the company's own words, "from the coffee to the cup." In practice that means the beans roasted at Caffier, the cups made at Madil, and the machines vendinGO already operates would all sit under one roof — a level of control over cost and supply that is rare for a small Portuguese operator, and one the founders are betting will pay off as input prices stay volatile.
Manufacturing, though, is a different discipline from distribution, and the company is candid about the challenge. "Now that we're integrating manufacturing, we know it will be more challenging, but we are prepared," Gabriel Marques dos Santos said. The firm expects the expansion to create 20 new qualified jobs in the Aveiro district, where it is based.
The move plays to a national strength. Portugal is a country of committed coffee drinkers, where the small, strong espresso — the bica in Lisbon, the cimbalino in Porto — is a daily ritual and a fiercely competitive market dominated by established roasters. Carving out room against those incumbents will not be easy, and a 15-million-euro target set for the end of a single year is ambitious for a company that only rebranded two years ago. But vendinGO's wager is a familiar one in the Bairrada, a region known for turning local know-how into national businesses: own more of what you sell, and you keep more of what you earn. Whether the numbers follow the ambition is the question the next few months will answer.
