Vending company expands to Rogersville

Tucked in on the south side of Rogersville within view of U.S. Highway 60 is an operations center that serves as a local expansion for a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based vending company.

Imperial LLC held a June 27 ribbon-cutting ceremony with the Rogersville Area Chamber of Commerce as part of its grand opening celebration. Emily Kinney, general manager of the 246 Johnstown Drive facility, said the event was the public unveiling of the 67,000-square-foot center that is roughly triple the size of its former home on Webster Street in Springfield.

For its vending machines, the company provides over 450,000 items, such as snacks and bottled beverages, according to its website. As an independent company, Kinney said Imperial can choose any products it wishes to offer to clients. For example, it doesn’t have to choose between Coke or Pepsi products.

Additionally, the company, which employs over 850 people, produces coffee and coffee machines, and water and ice machines. Imperial also stocks “micro-markets,” a convenience store concept with kiosks that are tailored for business break rooms. All materials used for these markets and machines are housed in the new operations center and held for distribution.

“Our customer is in a large employment environment, so think of any large employer in the area that comes to mind, and they’re probably our customer,” she said, noting that includes Bass Pro Shops, CoxHealth, Mercy Springfield Communities and O’Reilly Automotive Inc. (Nasdaq: ORLY). “As service to our customer, we want to understand what their challenges are, what their goals are, what their concerns are and how we can help them provide workplace refreshment solutions for their employees.”

The Rogersville facility also serves as a warehouse site for its vending machines, including repair work.

“These machines, they’re all tagged, marked by type,” Kinney said. “We just pull them out and we will provision these to other Imperial branches if needed.”

The company website lists 15 locations, including Joplin. Coffeyville, Kansas, was added earlier this year to the company’s facility roster, expanding its footprint to seven states, which also include Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa and Texas.

Kinney said quick service response to its vending machines is a priority.

“In our business, we have a 24-hour or same-day response time to service calls,” she said. “If we get a call that a machine is not working, we have to have a tech out there that day. We want to resolve all service calls within 48 hours. If a service issue is going to require a part that’s going to take more than three days, we just switch them out. We don’t have any tolerance for machines to be down.”

Imperial origin
Founder Paul Tims started Imperial in 1979 as a coffee service company, serving as its lone employee for six years. He expanded operations into vending in 1993, according to its website. Officials say the company has grown organically as well as through acquisitions.

Its entry into the Missouri market was through the 2021 acquisition of Jackson Brothers of the South, Kinney said, adding the vending assets of Kinney Amusement Co. were acquired by Imperial a few months later. Kinney said that at the time she was running the vending portion of the business, which was started in 1948 by her grandparents, Art and Lorena Kinney. She joined Imperial after the acquisition and soon after became general manager of the Springfield facility. Kinney Amusement remains in operation, as does the family’s retail store, Kinney Billiard Sales Inc., she said.

Food production at Imperial was added in 1998, and the company continues to produce over 50 different items five days a week out of a 65-employee kitchen in Tulsa, said Michael Dry, Imperial vice president. The other company facilities place orders, which are delivered same day from Tulsa and are quickly ready to deliver to clients by early the next morning, officials say.

“We make a variety of different things, from breakfast sandwiches to salads to wraps to entrees to a value line of sandwiches. We call them wedges,” Dry said, adding the company produces nearly 7 million products annually out of its kitchen.

The Rogersville facility delivers to 22 routes all over southwest Missouri, Kinney said. The coverage area is north to Clinton, south to the Arkansas state line, west to Monett and east to Fort Leonard Wood.

Many of Imperial’s produced foods are part of its micro-markets, which now exceed 1,000, including 300 in Missouri, Kinney said. They offer over 300 food items, including fresh and healthy options, such as salads and fruit cups. Most prices range $2.75-$6.

Mercy Springfield Communities spokesperson Ettie Berneking said the health system, which is headquartered in St. Louis, has been an Imperial client for years. While she was unable to get confirmation by press time on the number of vending machines it uses, she said Mercy has equipment on its campuses in Springfield, Aurora, Carthage, Cassville, Galena, Joplin, Lebanon, Ozark and Columbus, Kansas.

Kinney said micro-markets comprise roughly 65% of business for the company in the southwest Missouri region – a shift from the traditional vending machines, which she added is probably about 25%, while the office coffee service is nearly 10%.

“There’s no cost to our customer for machines or markets,” she said. “They provide the space and the electrical or water, if anything requires water. They don’t operate the machines, as they’re our assets. We continue to operate them, and then we collect the revenues from the purchases that are made.”

While Imperial’s annual revenue exceeded $150 million in 2022, according to its website, Kinney said its continued expansion is pushing the company closer to $200 million.

Rogersville relocation
Kinney said Imperial also looked at property in Battlefield and Strafford before selecting Rogersville as the construction site. Williams Construction Co. was general contractor for the project designed by R.E. Werner Architect LLC, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. The goal was to build a facility that was large enough to easily accommodate the company’s local workforce, which she said currently sits at 88.

“Part of it was the availability of land,” she said, declining to disclose the project cost. “The size of piece of land that we needed limited us a lot. There just wasn’t a whole lot available.”

Additionally, company officials felt there would be too many competitors for the same hiring pool in the Battlefield and Strafford areas.

“Rogersville seemed like a real comfortable spot for hiring,” Kinney said, adding Imperial’s ability to attract and retain talent has improved since last year’s move. “We started to see a better quality of candidate coming through when we moved here, and we’ve had better longevity with those employees, so lower turnover.”

Although the company currently isn’t planning to boost the local workforce much beyond its current size, the opportunity to do so exists along with land on which to expand.

“Our building provides us enough room to grow,” she said. “We’ll be able to be in this building for a really long time.