Evolvending Brings Automated Dining Kiosks to Two More U.S. Airports

The concession stands that used to anchor late-night airport terminals — the ones where a server rang up your $18 airport burger at 11 p.m. — are facing a quieter kind of competition. Evolvending launched automated dining locations at Southwest Florida International Airport (RSW) in Fort Myers and Charleston International Airport (CHS) in South Carolina, adding two more nodes to a growing network of unstaffed food kiosks that operate around the clock without a line cook, cashier, or host in sight.

Passengers and airport staff at both locations can buy ready-to-eat meals and snacks through Evolvending's self-service kiosks. The company's lineup includes nationally recognized brands: California Pizza Kitchen, White Castle, Wow Bao, and Dirty Cookie. The kiosks dispense freshly heated items on demand, which Evolvending markets as a fix for the well-documented dead zone in airport food service.

Airport concessions face growing pressure to provide round-the-clock service while managing high labor and build-out costs. For travelers, that often means limited late-night dining options. Hot food vending aims to address both challenges by providing a restaurant-quality dining experience at any hour.

Evolvending currently runs over 30 kiosks in major airports and transit locations, with more than 50 additional sites scheduled to open in the coming months. The company already operates across high-traffic transportation hubs in markets including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Fort Myers. CEO Valentina Ellison framed the pace of expansion as demand-driven: "Demand for high-quality, on-demand dining continues to accelerate, and through our deep airport and brand relationships plus innovative technology powered by ART [automated retail technologies], we are rapidly expanding both our footprint and our portfolio of restaurant partners."

Charleston International Airport president and CEO Elliott Summey offered the airport-side rationale, and notably extended the benefit explicitly to workers already in the terminal, not just travelers passing through. "These new self-service kiosks provide quick access to well-known brands and fresh food around the clock, ensuring that travelers and airport employees alike have great options no matter when they're in the terminal."

The RSW deployment runs under the Evolve Eats brand name and is built on a partnership between Evolvending and Sarasota-based food automation platform Just Baked. Each food item carries a unique QR code to track shelf life, with expired items automatically blocked from sale. Machine temperatures are displayed on-screen and continuously logged. An independent Bluetooth sensor monitors conditions, and if temperatures drift outside approved ranges, the vending unit locks automatically. Troy Hutchinson, director of marketing operations for Just Baked, acknowledged the regulatory complexity that comes with scaling this model nationally: "Every city and county has its own rules around permitting, health inspections, and how an unattended hot food kiosk is classified, so we've had to build a kiosk and food solution that meets the criteria of regulatory bodies across the country."

On the supply chain side, Hutchinson was candid that the logistics challenge is not trivial: "On the operations side, getting food distribution right at a national scale is non-trivial: you're dealing with cold-chain logistics, product shelf life, and coordinating distributors and logistics so our operators have safe, high-quality product. We've now done the lion's share of the work to get those challenges behind us, creating processes that are repeatable as we add more locations and more branded food concepts."

For brand partners, the appeal is distribution without construction costs. California Pizza Kitchen president of CPK Global Michael Beacham said Evolvending "gives us a powerful new way to expand that presence," adding that "their automated retail platform helps bring the CPK brand to more travelers in high-traffic environments while maintaining the quality and innovation our guests expect."

What the company's announcements don't address is the staffing calculus at the concession level. None of Evolvending's public materials quantify how the kiosks interact with existing concessionaire contracts, whether displaced positions flow to stocking or maintenance roles, or what unions representing airport hospitality workers make of the expansion. Evolvending continues to scale as airports seek "flexible, labor-efficient solutions" that enhance the passenger experience while maximizing concession revenue — a framing that treats reduced labor as a selling point, not a complication worth explaining.

Just Baked's network currently includes more than 800 active kiosks, with hundreds more planned through large-scale partnerships with Sodexo, Aramark, and Compass across healthcare, education, and corporate locations. The broader trajectory is clear: hot food vending is moving from novelty to infrastructure, one airport terminal at a time, and the people who used to staff those late-night counters are not part of the press release.