They thought vending machine coffee was terrible, so they built one themselves
Vending machine coffee often has a reputation for being watery and bitter—it’s the kind of drink you settle for just because it’s convenient.
But Flow Coffee is trying to change that assumption.
Over the past year, its vending machines have used real Meiji milk and oat milk instead of the cheap powdered creamer common among competitors, aiming to make the coffee taste closer to what you’d get at a café.
The numbers suggest it’s working. Flow now sells 23,000 cups a month and has surpassed 150,000 cups sold through 35 machines, built up in just over a year.
Vulcan Post spoke to the trio behind Flow Coffee—Wei Sheng Chang, 29, Qingyuan Zhang, 26, and Jacky Pu, 26—to find out how they’ve built Flow Coffee into a fast-growing vending machine business.
Choosing vending machines over a cafe
Wei Sheng first conceived Flow Coffee in October 2023, while working full-time as a data scientist.
The idea came from a simple frustration: a decent cup of milk coffee could cost S$8 or more, often requiring a 15- to 20-minute walk to a café. He had also noticed coffee prices rising across cafés and neighbourhood coffee shops.
He wanted to bridge the gap between affordability and quality.
His first thought was to open a café. But after running the numbers, he realised rental and manpower costs would eat into the savings he wanted to pass on to customers.
That led him to vending machines. At the time, most machines used powdered milk because it was cheaper and easier to operate.
But Wei Sheng didn’t see them as something he’d buy from regularly. “If I’m desperate, I’ll buy,” he said.
So he decided to build a vending machine that used fresh milk instead.
Building a coffee machine from scratch
Wei Sheng started by sketching out a machine that could make speciality coffee with fresh milk, including a milk-circuit cleaning system rigorous enough to safely dispense fresh milk at scale.
He also pushed for other proprietary features, such as an aroma-release mechanism that emits the smell of freshly brewed coffee.
But sketching the machine was one thing. Finding a manufacturer willing to build it proved harder.
Wei Sheng flew to China alone and researched manufacturers across Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia before settling on suppliers in China through Alibaba.
To convince factories to take him seriously as a young Singaporean with no business track record, he borrowed the credentials of his father’s friend’s instant-coffee company and presented himself as leading a larger coffee venture.
It worked, and a manufacturer agreed to prototype a machine the industry had largely written off as too complex to build.
But the partnership was soon put to the test at a trade show in Guangzhou, where Wei Sheng brought his own coffee beans to test the finished prototype. The machine he co-developed immediately attracted interest from larger buyers, causing the manufacturer to shift its priorities overnight.
Negotiations for the machines started at 30 units, before falling to 15 and then 12. Eventually, the manufacturer gave Wei Sheng two choices: take one machine with no exclusivity rights, or walk away empty-handed.
Wei Sheng eventually took the machine, while the patent stayed in China.
“Anyone can copy hardware,” he said of the decision. “But the data you obtain from running real operations on the ground, that’s what compounds and that’s more valuable. We’ll come back for the patent later.”
From one founder to three
Wei Sheng wasn’t building Flow Coffee alone for long.
Qingyuan Zhang had been his junior at NUS. After graduating with a business degree and while job-hunting, Qingyuan heard about what Wei Sheng was working on. Seeing an opportunity to build a business of his own, he joined Wei Sheng.
The third co-founder, Jacky Pu, came in through a chance connection.
Jacky was managing a café in Holland Village that Wei Sheng frequented. As the two got to know each other, they discovered they shared an interest in starting a business. Jacky had been thinking about roasting his own coffee beans, and the two saw an opportunity to combine their ambitions.
Jacky joined as Flow Coffee’s Chief Product Officer, with Wei Sheng overseeing operations and Qingyuan handling marketing.
From the initial idea to a working machine, it took the trio one year and nine months. They launched Flow Coffee in May 2025 with just S$20,000 in initial capital.
Early reception wasn’t great
Flow Coffee’s machine replicates a physical espresso setup almost part-for-part, down to using the same grade of German-made components a café espresso machine would use, plus a proprietary closed-system foam maker that doesn’t rely on an open steam wand.
For its coffee, Flow sources speciality-grade Brazilian Arabica beans from a local roaster, which the founders regard as among the best available. They believe customers can taste the difference even through a vending machine.
Prices start from S$3.50, but early reception was lukewarm.
People were curious enough to walk up and look, but conversion was low as most carried the general assumption that vending machine coffee just isn’t very good.
To overcome that, the founders ran launch events and gave out free drinks, engaging customers directly to explain what made their coffee different before asking them to pay for it.
Once people actually tasted the coffee, sales started to climb and have held up since.
The team later leaned on the same tactic at scale, running blind taste tests and pitting Flow against established brands like Starbucks, other vending machines, and cafés. According to the founders, Flow ranked either first or second in most of them.
The price of using fresh milk
Fresh milk is one of Flow Coffee’s biggest differentiators, but it also creates its biggest operational headache.
While a typical vending machine might be serviced once a month, Flow’s machines need attention roughly every two days. Milk, syrup and tubing are replaced on a set schedule, with old batches discarded rather than topped up to minimise the risk of cross-contamination.
To manage that without needing an outsized headcount, the team runs IoT sensors across every machine feeding into a backend dashboard that tracks inventory and flags faults in real time, with AI layered on top to optimise maintenance timing and how much stock to top up at each stop.
Even so, machine consistency remains an ongoing challenge—one mechanical hiccup on a vending machine can affect every customer who visits it that day. As such, Wei Sheng and Qingyuan personally handle customer service throughout the day, aiming to respond to any complaint within three minutes.
Flow also deliberately avoids shopping malls, and not entirely by choice, but because mall landlords typically won’t allow a coffee vending machine near an existing café tenant to protect that tenant’s business.
Instead, it targets hospitals, schools and offices. Locations such as NUS and LASALLE College of the Arts give Flow access to regular foot traffic without the high rents and restrictions of a typical retail café tenancy.
It has also found opportunities in older retail spaces, such as Bukit Timah Plaza, where a Flow machine was installed after Starbucks pulled out.
Flow Coffee’s big break
In Aug 2025, Flow got one of its biggest breaks when it joined the inaugural BIG x Stellarate 3.0 programme, SMRT’s retail-innovation initiative, through SMU’s Business Innovations Generator (BIG) incubator.
As one of three winners, Flow gained access to premium deployment spots across SMRT’s transit retail network that would have been difficult to secure independently. It also received a share of a grant pool worth more than S$130,000 and opportunities to pilot across SMRT’s network.
From there, Flow expanded from around five machines when it joined BIG to 35 machines about a year later. The expansion also pushed monthly sales to a record 23,000 cups.
But for Wei Sheng, growth isn’t simply about putting more machines on the ground. The priority is proving that the operational model can remain stable and consistent across locations before scaling further.
As the brand continues to grow, the trio said venture capital firms have approached them about international expansion and franchising. They are also exploring other concepts under the Flow Coffee brand.
“Every cup is a chance to change how people think about vending machine coffee,” Wei Sheng said. “We want them to know—great coffee doesn’t need a café. It just needs passion, precision and a little bit of grind.”
- Find out more about Flow Coffee here.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
Featured Image Credit: Flow Coffee
