A small British company, building one thing.

What we do, and what we deliberately do not

Nubar does not manufacture machines, does not own them, does not stock them, and does not decide what they sell. It sits between the customer and the machine and answers one question: may this door open for this person, and what should they be charged when it closes.

Nubar never holds anybody's money. Every basket settles directly from the customer's card into the operator's own account, because the operator is the merchant of record. Nubar's fee is deducted at settlement. That is an architectural decision rather than a preference, and it is the reason the company can be neutral between operators who compete with each other.

Where we have got to

The application is built and works end to end: enrolment, age verification, the scan, the unlock, the basket, the charge, the settlement, refunds, the recovery sequence and the appeal route. It runs against a simulated cooler that speaks the same interface a real machine will, so the integration is a genuine test rather than a shortcut around one.

What has not happened is a machine on a wall. No coolers are running on the network, there are no customers, and payments run in Stripe's test mode until an independent security review is complete. We are at the stage of talking to operators, and we would rather say that plainly than imply an estate that does not exist.

Age verification and the vending ban

Every machine on the network defaults to requiring a customer to be sixteen or over. The check is done once, by a provider certified under the government's digital verification services trust framework, and Nubar stores only the confirmed attribute with the provider's reference. Nubar never sees the document, the image, or the date of birth.

We have made a submission to the Department of Health and Social Care asking for machines with that capability to be recognised when the regulations on high-caffeine energy drinks are drafted. It is set out in full here, along with our commercial interest in the outcome.

Getting in touch

Email hello@nubar.uk. If you run machines, the register interest form reaches the same place and tells us more.