Do you struggle to maintain a healthy and balanced diet at work? Often there’s no time to prepare meals at home, tupperware boxes are left forgotten in the fridge, and traditional solutions, such as cafeterias, vending machines, or food delivery services, tend to offer heavy, low-nutritional meals. This was the very challenge that led Martim Caldeira, the most recent guest on the Negócios com Impacto videocast, to found Compound Life, a start-up that is transforming the vending machine market and redefining how professionals eat at work, for the better.
Compound Life offers an innovative, tech-driven, and sustainable solution: smart fridges equipped with proprietary technology that provide fresh meals, healthy snacks, and sugar-free drinks, all accessible through a mobile app. The start-up carefully curates its product selection, focusing on local brands and Portuguese suppliers. By avoiding intermediaries, the company ensures competitive, supermarket-level prices and promotes sustainable consumption.
“We have options for any time of day, whether it’s a light snack or a more substantial meal,” Martim explains in the episode. “We’re doing to vending what Uber did to taxis. We’ve made the product higher quality and the whole user experience much smoother, with no need for physical payments.”
The purchasing experience resembles that of e-commerce: users can add multiple items to their cart and complete the purchase all at once (unlike traditional vending machines) using digital payment methods such as MBWay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit cards, or meal cards, directly through the app.
The first machine was installed in February 2020, just weeks before the onset of the pandemic, a particularly challenging time for a company whose operations relied on office settings. Even so, the team managed to implement the service in locations that remained open, such as hospitals and student residences, allowing them to test and refine the business model.
It was precisely the company’s early stage and low operational costs that helped Compound Life weather the crisis. Today, it operates over 20 smart fridges in Portugal, three in London, and serves more than a thousand active users per month. Expansion plans include Spain, the United States, and the Middle East, driven by what Martim describes as “a massive exodus of Europeans who are bringing new eating habits with them.”
But Compound Life’s purpose goes far beyond convenience. Its true impact lies in changing eating habits and promoting a more balanced lifestyle, one that directly improves energy, productivity, and overall well-being throughout the day.
This philosophy is embedded in the company’s very name, Compound Life, a reference to the compound effect of small, daily choices that, over time, make a significant difference in people’s health.
“We have a culture of drinking too much coffee because we’re constantly compensating for how poorly we eat,” Martim observes. “Not all meals are created equal. If I eat a steak with fries, my afternoon productivity will be completely different from if I eat something balanced. If we chose meals with more fiber, protein, less fat, sugar, and salt, we probably wouldn’t need to drink four or five coffees in the afternoon.”
Compound Life is featured in the latest episode of Negócios com Impacto, a partnership between Rádio Renascença and CATÓLICA-LISBON, now available on Spotify and YouTube.