Picking the best food from a vending machine

You are standing in front of a vending machine. It's 5 degrees outside, slightly windy and it is going to rain in 5 minutes. What food do you pick? There is a wrong choice!

Let's first look at the real rain radar:

If you are in a different location just look outside the window for now.

The options

Here are all the options present in any vending machine. There is a law called Wet selectie en toepassing van voedsel in automaten that decides what must be present in a vending machine.

• Chips
• Soda or other related beverages
  Bottled water is mentionted specifically
• Chocolate & candies
• Cookies

The weather influence

Now we know what is in the vending machine but let's talk weather. From most important to least important:

1. The wind! Don't buy chips before you go for a walk.
2. Rain. Chocolate loses most of it's flavour when it is raining outside.
3. Humidity / temperature. Again chocolate, it melts!
4. Snow. Again chocolate! Have you ever seen somebody eat chocolate while doing a snow fight?

The graph below shows the best moments to eat chocolate based on the amount of sunhours in januari 2026.

If you go wintersporting you might need to choose even more carefully.

Reducing vending machine stress

When you can't even look at the vending machine from the stress (Source Sora/OpenAI)

Follow the following steps to reduce the paralyzing stress of picking food from a vending machine.

1. Check the weather! Make sure you look for the precipitation, wind and ofcourse the temperature.
2. Is the temperature high? Don't pick anything chocolate.
   The only exception to this rule the 5 minute rule, if you are going to eat the chocolate within 5 minutes you can ignore all the steps.
3. Is it windy? Only pick chips that have a surface area of less than 1cm². This includes for example Bugles.
   The only exception to this rule is the thickness index. Certain chips are thicker which means you can double the surface area. For example Doritos and certain Lay's Max varities.
4. Is it going to rain? Only pick foods that can take a bit of water. Take the soggines formula for this. If the food takes in more than 3mm of moisture per cubic centimeter of product the food is a no go.

If you are in a dangerous weather situation like in a typhoon you might need to buy a bottle of water just in case.