Hospitals & NHS sites
Night staff, visitors, 24/7 demand, trust-sensitive — exactly where UV/RO/automated cleaning differentiate.
REfranchise is a UK operator partnership built to bring TAO BIN's Flying Turtle platform — a 1m² automated barista serving 180+ freshly made drinks, 24/7 — into the UK's after-hours economy. We're targeting the venues coffee shops can't cover: hospitals, universities, transport hubs and residential schemes that currently leave demand on the table.
UK coffee consumption is structurally enormous, but access collapses outside normal trading hours. That gap is where Flying Turtle wins — not by re-fighting the saturated coffee-to-go market, but by anchoring in venues with predictable people, extended hours, and weak after-hours alternatives.
“27% of the UK workforce — around 8.7 million people — usually work evenings or nights. Night-time work is concentrated in human health and social work, accommodation and food services, and transport and storage.”
Demand is high. Café access is low after hours. The unattended market already proves consumers will pay £2.81 weighted average for a vended drink — leaving a clear pricing window for a better machine offering breadth, freshness, and 24/7 uptime.
At a £2.70–£2.75 average ticket, Flying Turtle prices below the £3.51 12oz café latte but squarely within the unattended-premium territory the UK consumer already accepts.
Sources: World Coffee Portal (2024), AVA (2025). Flying Turtle benchmark from this proposal’s base case.
Flying Turtle isn’t a vending machine. It’s a compact, automated beverage platform built for trust-sensitive, always-on environments — with hygiene and telemetry engineered in.
Hot, cold, blended, carbonated, and non-carbonated. Sweetness, shots, and toppings customisable per cup.
W100 × L90 × H190 cm. Standard 240V/10A. Drops into a hospital corridor, university foyer, or transport concourse with no host fit-out.
Reverse-osmosis water, UV sterilisation, in-machine ice production, and automatic cleaning cycles after each cup.
Live restocking and fault alerts, autonomous troubleshooting, loyalty hooks, route-density optimised for <30-min service per 400 cups.
The proposition only works if the machine is awake when the café isn’t. That’s the entire thesis.
32-inch touchscreen, multi-rail payments, mobile and contactless — fully aligned with UK vending behaviour (80% cashless).
TAO BIN’s scaling curve in Thailand is the strongest signal that the underlying platform — not just the product — is built for territory-level rollout. The challenge isn’t whether the model works. It’s execution discipline at country scale.
AVA reports prime coffee-to-go locations are already saturated and new installs are drifting into lower-footfall sites. We are deliberately not chasing those forecourts. Our pilot anchors in venues with three traits: predictable population, extended hours, weak after-hours access.
Night staff, visitors, 24/7 demand, trust-sensitive — exactly where UV/RO/automated cleaning differentiate.
Edinburgh has 60,000+ students across multiple campuses, late library hours, and accommodation clusters with no in-block beverage option.
Waverley, Haymarket, Edinburgh Airport — long dwell times, peaks outside café hours, captured audience.
Distribution depots, build-to-rent and PRS schemes, hotel back-of-house — predictable shift patterns, weak retail nearby.
Move the sliders. The model uses TAO BIN’s own 50-cups/day site viability benchmark. Below it, contribution is thin. Above it, the unit becomes meaningful and the rollout becomes financeable.
Contribution is per machine, before capex, head-office overhead and tax. Base case used in the UK proposal: £2.75 ASP · 35% COGS · 15% commission · 1.5% payment · £750 ops.
Regulatory complexity is one of the most common reasons international vending plays under-perform in the UK. We are treating it as a first-class workstream from day one.
Each operating premise registered ≥28 days before trading. Allergen UI built into the touchscreen — non-prepacked drinks scope.
Conformity documentation supplied by HQ; site sign-off and 240V/10A install validation handled locally.
Flexible cup & lid sourcing, clear waste responsibilities with hosts, financial buffer for evolving levies.
Telemetry-led servicing, <30-minute service per 400 cups, redeployment trigger at sub-threshold sites.
REfranchise is built by an Edinburgh-based operations & compliance lead and a Bangkok-based stakeholder & project lead — exactly the two-sided coverage required to run a UK rollout while keeping a clear, fluent line into TAO BIN HQ in Thailand.
Operations Coordinator at Continental Industries Group in New York, where I act as central point of contact for international trade transactions across import, export, and third-country flows — turning counterparty profiles, transaction economics and exposure analysis into structured memos for management sign-off, and designing the Power Automate workflows that integrate logistics, finance and procurement data. I bring REfranchise the operational discipline, compliance fluency, and Edinburgh ground game.
Project Coordinator at the Thailand Development Research Institute, running timelines and inter-agency coordination across 41 activities and translating technical material between Thai and international stakeholders. I bring REfranchise the direct Bangkok stakeholder access, fluent Thai-English translation, and the cross-cultural project management to keep the relationship with TAO BIN HQ moving — fast, clear, and culturally fluent.
One co-founder embedded in the UK operating market. One co-founder embedded in TAO BIN's home market. Both routes always live.
Weekly cadence across BKK / GMT, structured docs, and a shared task system already operating in production.
Equipment, brand alignment, and clarity on the commercial structure — see The Ask, below.
REfranchise is proposing a structure consistent with TAO BIN's stated international preference and with Forth's prior overseas joint ventures — exclusive territory rights, performance-gated rollout, and a kiosk-supply / revenue-share economic model.