VendinGo acquires Caffier to own the roast

🇵🇹 Gabriel Marques dos Santos and Airton dos Santos Pedro, co-founders and co-CEOs of VendinGo, have announced a €1.8 million investment to acquire Portuguese roastery Caffier and build a dedicated coffee manufacturing and roasting division at the company's iPark base in Oliveira do Bairro, Aveiro.

VendinGo supplies procurement, stock management, and logistics to vending machine operators across Portugal and Spain. It serves more than 800 active clients and is present in more than 100,000 points of sale, competing directly with Serdial Vending and NVending in the Portuguese market. Until this deal, Gimoka supplied the coffee that moved through that network.

Caffier has operated as an independent Portuguese roastery since 2010. The acquisition also integrates the Multispresso brand, which produces capsules compatible with the main systems on the market, extending VendinGo's reach into retail alongside its vending core.

The operation is scheduled to launch by the end of 2026. Production will be consolidated at iPark, placing the new roasting unit inside the same logistics cluster VendinGo already operates from, which removes incremental placement cost from the supply chain.

"É em Portugal, mais concretamente nas nossas origens, em Oliveira do Bairro, que vamos criar a nossa unidade de fabrico e torrefação." — Gabriel Marques dos Santos, CEO and Co-founder, May 2026.

The timing is causally precise. VendinGo entered Spain officially in 2025 and needed a proprietary coffee product before deepening that expansion. With Caffier absorbed, the company removes Gimoka from its own cost stack and simultaneously creates a branded coffee product that operators across its 100,000-point network cannot source from any competing distributor.

In 2025 VendinGo launched bitee, which it describes as the first exclusive brand created specifically for vending machines, in a segment that had until then relied on mass-market brands adapted to the channel. Caffier follows the same logic at the upstream production layer rather than the consumer-facing label.

The parallel in the US market is instructive. In March 2026, Royal Cup acquired Farmer Brothers in an all-cash transaction to create a scaled roaster-distributor platform in the foodservice channel. VendinGo is executing the same integration move at SME scale in the Iberian vending channel, converting its largest input cost into a captive revenue line ahead of a planned European expansion.

What the deal actually unlocks is structural pricing control. Every vending operator buying coffee through VendinGo's distribution network will now be buying from a vertically integrated competitor that sets the roast, the brand, and the margin from bean to machine.