Smoothe 🌿

Smoothe Wellness Retail  ·  Williams  ·  Boston, MA   Every major retail channel has a brand that owns it. Unattended retail, roughly $34B across about 2.3 million machines and about 15,000 operators, does not. Smoothe is building to be that brand. Smoothe operates curated wellness retail hubs inside high-intent spaces like gyms, offices, apartment buildings, campuses and more. Customers tap to open, take what they want, and are charged automatically; no cashier, no checkout, no app. The venue gets a revenue line and a member amenity with zero operating responsibility; the brand gets shelf space, product trial, and purchase data from real buyers. Smoothe also sells advertising, sampling, and data to those brands. Smoothe, Inc. is the legal entity. A consumer-facing brand will launch alongside the first wrapped units. We’re not building a vending company. We’re building the next great American wellness retail brand. Erewhon-level curation, at the places people already are. Aaron Finder, Co-Founder & CEO $8,000+ in revenue through the machines, cumulative across pilot deployments to date 1,400+ completed purchases across the same pilot deployments ~34% contribution per machine on a modeled $1,620 of monthly sales, with gross margin around 57% Company-reported, revised from an earlier $2,175 assumption on the basis of actual transaction data. Machine contribution is before overhead and market-level logistics. Business model Revenue streams • Smoothe places, stocks, and operates every fridge itself; the venue has no operating responsibility. • Product sales fund the business today; advertising, sampling (brands paying to distribute free samples through the fridge), and data are the higher-margin layer on top. • The venue receives a new revenue line and a member amenity; the brand receives physical distribution and product trial, plus purchase data from real buyers rather than a survey. • Boston is the proving ground for the advertising and data layer; expansion follows density, and those revenue lines accelerate it. Traction to date • The first hub is live in Harvard Square with Central Rock Gym. A signed LOI targets seven Boston-area locations within the 30-location regional chain: one live, four immediately deployable, and two pending an incumbent-vendor transition; approximately $100–200K of ARR potential by the company’s estimate. • Harvard Square grew 29% month over month in July, from $937 to $1,211, on an expanded product assortment. Transactions were up 15% and average ticket rose from $5.39 to $6.03, so the growth came from both more visits and larger baskets. Three SKUs went out of stock during the month. • Four wellness brands have signed LOIs for the advertising and data business: MOSS (co-founded by Michael B. Jordan), Culture Pop, Waku, and CraveClean. • The model scales in steps: seven machines represents approximately $136K of ARR and $47K of contribution, twenty machines $389K and $134K, fifty machines $973K and $335K, and a 125-machine metro approximately $2.43M and $837K. The 125-machine metro is the phase-one build target rather than the funded plan. • The base plan targets 85 active machines in Boston by October 2027 at a cadence of roughly six installations per month; approximately $1.7M in annualized product revenue at modeled mature performance, with no advertising, sampling, placement, or data revenue included in that figure. • Machines are financed in installments; cash from the installed base funds the next batch, and each added stop in a given area lowers the per-machine cost of restocking and servicing the route. • 2026 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge semifinalist and Alumni Launch Lab member, with Vendera as retail tech partner.

The last retail channel without a brand

The market Smoothe is stepping into

TAM	~$34B	U.S. unattended retail: about 2.3M machines, about 15,000 operators, no dominant brand
SAM	~$2B	Roughly 75,000 qualifying high-intent venues nationally (premium boutique studios, full-service gyms, Class A office, upscale hotels, luxury multifamily) at about 1.5 machines per venue and about $19K of annual revenue per machine
Phase 1 metro build-out (125 machines)	~$2.4M	Smoothe’s first-phase Boston target, not metro saturation and not the funded plan; the base plan is 85 machines by October 2027

Unattended retail is a roughly $34B market spread across about 2.3M machines and about 15,000 operators, with no dominant brand. Better-for-you CPG has produced roughly $5B in acquisitions across three major deals since late 2024: Poppi to PepsiCo at $1.95B, Alani Nu to Celsius at $1.8B, and Siete to PepsiCo at $1.2B. Olipop is separately valued at $1.85B on its most recent funding round. The category itself is investable.

The shelf space is scaling alongside the brands. Target announced a 30% expansion of its wellness assortment for 2026, the third consecutive year it has added to the category after roughly 2,000 new products in 2025, and says about 70% of its guests are already shopping wellness. Ulta, Walmart and Costco have made similar moves. The products and the shelf space are both growing. What is missing is a channel that reaches people at the moment of intent.

TAM reflects U.S. convenience services and combined vending plus micro-market sales per industry sources; machine and operator counts are third-party industry estimates. The SAM build and the Phase 1 figure are Smoothe’s own estimates. Deal values are as announced by the acquirers.

Nobody else does all three

How Smoothe sits next to the alternatives

	Curated	In the venue	Brand + data
Traditional vending	–	✓	–
Farmer’s Fridge	✓	✓	–
Erewhon & grocery	✓	–	–
Smoothe	✓	✓	✓

A rough read on positioning, not a feature audit.

The founders

Aaron Finder Co-Founder & CEO  ·  Williams ’17  ·  HBS ’26 Built distribution and ran national marketing programs in CPG at Vita Coco and AB InBev, and ran straight into this exact gap trying to launch into gyms at Vita Coco. Hands-on with food and logistics, and an ex-collegiate rower who still races the Head of the Charles and HYROX. LinkedIn ↗

Stephen Bullard Co-Founder & COO  ·  35+ years in supply chain Built Pilot Logistics Services up to ~$80M in revenue across 25 fulfillment centers in seven countries, added $10M+ in EBITDA at Silver King Beverage, ran robotics-enabled fulfillment at Tompkins, and before that led logistics at PepsiCo Food Systems. LinkedIn ↗

Our take

What we like

•	Retail media (ads and shopper data layered onto thin-margin retail) runs at 50 to 90% margins against the 2 to 5% a grocer earns on product, and it’s now big enough that ads and membership make up roughly a third of Walmart’s operating profit. Smoothe’s fridges are a small retail media network wearing a vending machine.
•	$8,000 across 1,400 purchases is a $5.70 average ticket, against $1.50–$2.50 for a conventional vending machine, and July at Harvard Square ran ahead of that at $6.03. People will pay two to three times vending prices for something they actually want, where they already are.
•	Aaron built the CPG distribution and hit this exact wall at Vita Coco; Stephen scaled Pilot Logistics to ~$80M across 25 fulfillment centers. Between them, the two failure modes that usually kill vending companies, no venue relationships and no route density, are covered.

What we’re watching

•	This is capital- and operations-heavy. That 34% contribution has to hold once servicing, spoilage, and route costs scale past one hub.
•	The higher-margin ad and data business is still LOIs, not booked revenue.
•	Smoothe revised its per-machine assumption down from $2,175 to about $1,620 a month on the basis of actual transaction data, which is the right direction and puts the number just above the top of the $300–$1,500 range a conventional US vending machine does. July at Harvard Square was $1,211, roughly three-quarters of that model and trending toward it rather than sitting at it. The next phase is the test: placing high-quality locations, holding mature unit economics, and making Boston repeatable across 85 machines rather than one hub.

Learn more about Smoothe

Contact Jacob about this deal

Onward,
The Trivium Team

Shared for informational purposes only. Nothing here is investment, legal, or tax advice, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Traction and financial figures are company-reported and reflect an early-stage pilot; market figures are third-party estimates and have not been independently verified.