When it comes to consumer introduction to mobile payments, vending machines may rival parking meters as the perfect test case — frequent small-value, low-risk transactions. And as opposed to parking meters, consumers get a tasty reward at the end. That's why today's announcement by Dothan, Ala.-based Pepi Food Services may be seen in retrospect as a tipping point for mobile payments.

According to Pepi, the company will work with USA Technologies, Inc., a provider of wireless, cashless payment and M2M telemetry solutions for the self-serve and small-ticket retailing industries, to convert all of its vending machines across its 1,000 clients to USA Technologies ePort Connect cashless payment and telemetry service.  

"Our decision to go cashless was really about the customer experience," Pepi president Vic Pemberton said in the announcement. "We’ve had such a great customer response to the cashless experience on our vending machines that we decided to speed up the implementation."

Pemberton said the company has always planned on going cashless. The company originally planned on rolling out cashless vending machines within five years, but Pemberton said a program offered by USA Technologies accelerated that plan.

With the USA Technologies solution, vending machines will be able to accept plastic cards and, more importantly, NFC mobile payments as well.

"(W)e are always on the lookout for the latest trends and technologies and USA Technologies helps us stay ahead of the curve," Pemberton said. "For example, we have already deployed some of their NFC/contactless and mobile payments technology. When that trend reaches mainstream vending, we want to be ready."

USA Technologies said it has nearly 60,000 terminals linked to its ePort Connect service that are able to accept NFC/contactless payments and are designed to be open to all mobile payment platforms, including Google Wallet, ISIS, PayPal and others.

For more stories like this, visit the NFC/Contactless research center.