FAS International Brand Guidelines: The Adriani Brothers’ 1967 Vending Maker From Schio

Two brothers and a rotating tray.

FAS International is a vending-machine maker from Schio, an industrial town in the province of Vicenza, in Italy’s Veneto region. The company dates itself to 1967, and the coffee-trade magazine Comunicaffè reported in September 2025 that it was founded that year by Antonio Adriani and his brother Santino, who built the first prototype machine by hand on a patent of their own.

The company’s own history fills in the story. In the mid-1960s, it says, the two brothers set out to build a first vending prototype; the first production model was a rotating-tray machine, made entirely by hand, in which several discs were moved by a single motor through a set of mechanical clutches. In the 1980s, by its own account, FAS grew quickly and became known for refrigerated machines for snacks and food, with reliability and build quality as its calling cards.

The next steps came in decades. In the early 1990s, the company says, it introduced spiral machines, which put the product itself on view, and in 2000 it added coffee and hot-drink machines. It then began building tablets and connectivity into its machines, which it describes as opening the way to remote management and new ways of dealing with the end user, and later combined hardware and software for vending, automated canteens and automated retail.

For most of its history it was a family company. Comunicaffè reported in 2025 that the Adriani family held more than 90 percent, with Luca Adriani as president and Mariangela Adriani as vice-president, the second generation after the founder, Antonio. The regional business site VenetoEconomia also described the company in February 2026 as led by the founder’s children.

Hot, cold, delivery and ecology.

FAS says its products are “designed and built entirely in Italy.” Comunicaffè reported in 2025 that production takes place only in Italy, at the Schio plant, which then had 150 employees, built more than 14,000 machines a year and exported to 55 countries. The company’s website now speaks of more than 15,000 FAS machines a year going into shops and sites around the world.

The range is organised into four families, according to the same report: Hot, for coffee and hot drinks; Cold, for sweet and savoury snacks and drinks; Delivery, a set of systems for booking and collecting meals and small items; and Ecology, a line of shredders and compactors for plastic. On the website, the cold machines carry plain business names — Business, Advanced and Excellence — alongside the Skudo Evo, the Lift and the Easy 6000, while the hot-drink machines are called Lydia and Victoria. Each model listing gives the size of its tablet screen, from seven inches on some cold machines to 13.3 inches on the hot-drink models.

The company frames all this as “retail tech.” In the 2025 report, it described the vending machine as no longer a simple dispenser but an automated point of sale through which almost anything can be sold, with integrated cashless payment and remote control of configuration and performance. Its main markets were Italy, Spain and France, with growth in Poland, Turkey, Slovenia and Romania in 2024, Comunicaffè reported. Luca Adriani told the Schio news site AltoVicentinOnline in February 2026 that his father used to say anything could be sold through a vending machine, and that Western Europe remained the main market.

FAS also calls itself a Società Benefit, the Italian benefit-company form, and says it chose it because it believes innovation should create economic, social and environmental value.

Design and documentation.

Vending machine makers sell to operators, not to the people who buy a coffee or a chocolate bar, so they present themselves in two registers at once. To operators they talk about capacity, reliability, telemetry and ease of refilling; to the public their machines must look inviting on a station concourse, in a university corridor or beside an office kitchen. The glass-front snack machine, with its spiral shelves in view, and the coffee machine with a large lit selection panel are the two faces most people know.

The front panel has become the main design surface. Makers fit touchscreens, illuminated buttons and printed or backlit graphics, and many machines are co-branded with a coffee roaster or a drinks company, so the maker’s own name often sits small on the cabinet. Cashless readers for cards and phones now sit beside, or in place of, the coin slot, and some makers build their own payment and remote-management systems alongside the machines.

Behind the cabinet is an industrial story. Makers’ own websites and brochures tend to show factory lines, sheet-metal cabinets and spare-parts services. Several of the makers in this guide are based in northern Italy and two in Peralta, in Navarre, and some have passed through mergers and private-equity ownership.

The trade meets at fairs such as EU’Vend in Cologne and Venditalia in Milan, where makers launch new ranges to operators and distributors. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From family firm to fund-backed group.

Since 2024 the company has grown by acquisition. In October 2024 it bought a 35 percent stake in Alturas, a software house at Villafranca di Verona, and in February 2026 it agreed to raise that to 80 percent, VenetoEconomia reported. In July 2025 it took 70 percent of Vendix, a new company spun out of Microhard of Bologna to make automated machines for pharmacies and tobacconists, with an option to reach full ownership within two years; Comunicaffè reported that Vendix’s production would stay in Emilia-Romagna. The FAS website now presents Vendix as a company of the FAS International group.

The biggest change came in 2026. On 26 February the private-equity firm Wise Equity and the Adriani family announced a binding agreement for Wise Equity’s Wisequity VI fund to acquire a majority of FAS International. Under the joint statement reported by Comunicaffè and BeBeez, the Adriani family was to reinvest a significant stake, small minorities linked to the Boschetti and Marzotto families would remain, and the general manager, Francesco Cantini, would become chief executive of the group. Two days later AltoVicentinOnline reported that Wise Equity had taken the majority while the family kept a significant share. We found no separate announcement of the deal’s closing; in an August 2026 release Wise Equity described the fund as invested in seven companies, a count that includes FAS.

For a design guide, FAS International shows how a hand-built patent machine grew into a full product system with plain, functional range names. Compare Rheavendors and Bianchi Vending, two more vending-machine makers in this series. For this guide we use a deep blue, a steel grey and a warm orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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