Stop fighting the spiral and take off in capacity

Snack vending mechanics arrived at the factory twenty years ago. Today we explain why they no longer work — neither for us, nor for the plant.

 

Three weeks ago, a purchasing manager showed us a spreadsheet. Five spiral machines on the same plant floor, three different brands, plus a sixth ‘manual cabinet’ at the back where everything that didn’t fit anywhere else ended up. Helmets, work coveralls, harnesses, the odd big box of masks, welding gloves. “This should be inside a machine,” he told us.

He was right. And that manual cabinet is the best description of the limits of the spiral we have ever heard.

Every time a customer compares the HELIX 115 PLUS with a conventional spiral machine, the conversation ends in some version of the same problem. The spiral was designed for snacks: rigid, uniform, light and small items. When you ask it to dispense a helmet, a welding glove, a cutting disc, a coverall or a pair of boots, one of three things happens: it doesn’t fit, it jams, or it fits but only in ridiculous quantities.

That’s why we designed HELIX the way we did. It’s not a better spiral. It’s a different machine.

That’s why we designed HELIX the way we did. It’s not a better spiral. It’s a different machine.

1. Three mechanisms where there used to be one

Do you have products that don’t fit in any column? Are you still keeping a manual cabinet next to the machine for everything that doesn’t fit?

A conventional spiral splits the machine into identical horizontal trays: all with the same mechanics, all with the same limitations. If the spiral works badly for flexible gloves, it works badly for all sixty slots.

HELIX 115 PLUS combines spindle, pusher and spiral in the same machine, configurable. In practice, this means the plant manager picks which mechanism goes in each slot depending on the product: spindle for gloves and coveralls, pusher for masks and boxes, spiral — yes, we keep it too — for the few products where it’s still the best option.

One machine, three mechanisms, no “wrongly assigned” slots.

2. More than double the units in the same machine

Do you find the machine empty by mid-morning? Does your stocker have to come by four times a week?

The figures vary by product, but the pattern repeats. Gloves: ×1.87. Cutting discs: ×4.44. Disposable coveralls: ×2.80.

The reason is geometric. The spiral wastes half the space in the air between turns. The spindle doesn’t: products hang freely one after another, no dead space. A spiral machine dispenses fifteen discs per selection; a spindle dispenses sixty.

3. Zero jams: the product doesn’t force the mechanism

Are you stopping production every week because of jams? Soft products the machine deforms, or a helmet always stuck in some column?

A spiral pushes the product through a fixed gap. If the product is soft, it deforms. If it has a buckle, it gets caught. If the operator placed it one millimetre off-centre, it fails. The result is familiar to everyone: the machine registers a unit it doesn’t deliver, and someone has to open it with a key.

In HELIX the product is not forced: it hangs freely from the spindle or moves on the pusher. Extraction is clean even with soft or irregular products. That’s why we can dispense cut-resistant gloves, FFP3 masks, disposable coveralls, harnesses or helmets with the same reliability with which the spiral dispenses a bag of crisps.

4. Front loading in seconds

How much time does your team spend restocking machines? How many routes per week to keep them operating?

Restocking a spiral is slow work: you have to remove the dispenser, count the units left, reload one by one, fit it back in. Multiply that by sixty columns and the five rounds per week.

Spindle and pusher load from the front. No dismantling the system, no counting units slot by slot, no removing mechanisms. The stocker arrives, opens the door, refills in bulk and closes. Service time per machine drops to a third.

If the industrial supplier manages restocking as a service, the difference is straight margin. If the customer handles it, those are hours the warehouse team gives back to other work.

5. Change the product, without changing the machine

Do you change glove supplier and then have to reconfigure the machine? Does every new SKU require a different spiral?

It always happens. The plant changes glove supplier, or introduces a new mask, or decides to manage consumable tooling too. On a spiral machine, that means reconfiguring columns, ordering spirals of the right pitch, sometimes replacing the entire machine.

On HELIX, the spindle height is adjustable per product. No custom spirals, no specific parts, no mechanical reconfiguration. The operator reassigns the column from the software, adjusts the spindle in seconds, and the new SKU is up and running.

For a plant whose PPE catalogue changes several times a year, this means the machine ages better than the supply contract.

One machine where you used to need two or three

If we put the five points together, what emerges is something more strategic than “a better machine.” The purchasing manager’s plant from the opening can replace its five spiral machines and the manual cabinet with two HELIX. Same catalogue, better coverage, fewer reloads, fewer routes, fewer orphan SKUs living on shelves.

And HELIX doesn’t work alone. It’s part of the Gesmatik ecosystem — together with SKALEX for inventory by weight, BOX for delivery and return, KIOX as the order terminal, and SIGNED for the digital signature of PPE delivery records — under a single software platform. It’s what we’ve been arguing in another blog post: industrial vending stopped being vending a long time ago. What the plant needs is intelligent intralogistics. And intralogistics is not solved by inheriting the snack vending mechanics.

 

If your plant looks like the one in the spreadsheet at the top — machines that run out fast, a manual cabinet where everything that doesn’t fit ends up, restocks piling up — tell us what you dispense today and what you’d like to stop managing by hand. We’ll take it to the workshop and try it.

Request a demo | See the full catalogue

 

Gesmatik is a Spanish company specialised in industrial intralogistics solutions since 2009. We design and manufacture in Vitoria-Gasteiz the HELIX vending machine — with patented extraction technology — the SKALEX intelligent shelving for inventory control, the BOX lockers, the KIOX order terminals, and the SIGNED software for digitising PPE delivery records in compliance with workplace safety regulations. Present in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Iceland, Mexico and Costa Rica.