Russia’s first street milk vending machines that play mooing sounds when they dispense fresh milk have appeared in the central Russian city of Tambov, regional administration spokeswoman Natalia Spasskaya said on Wednesday.
“This is the first ‘street’ project in Russia. In Zelenograd in the Moscow Region, milk vending machines are installed inside wooden houses and in Voronezh they are placed in hypermarkets,” she said.
Tambov milk vending machines look like small news stands. Inside each of them, there are two 200-liter tanks, which are regularly refilled with fresh pasteurized milk, and a fridge that cools the milk to 4 degrees Celsius to keep it fresh.
Milk reservoirs are kept in vending machines for no longer than 24 hours, even though the pasteurized milk selling term is five days. Every 24 hours the remaining milk is sent to a local milk processing plant to produce cheese.
Each vending machine, which costs 1.45 million rubles ($45,000), sells 800 liters of milk a day on average.
So far, regional authorities have installed 10 street moo milk vending machines in the city and plan to install more in the wake of growing demand for the product.