You Can Buy A Fresh Steak From This Vending Machine 24/7

There's nothing like a thick, juicy ribeye when you get a hankering for steak. Your local butcher shop or your supermarket's meat department probably has a great selection, and plenty of other cuts, too. But what happens if it's the middle of the night, you just got off the late shift, and you want to grill up some dinner before the sun even rises? If other stores are closed, Daniels Gourmet Meats and Sausages in Bozeman, Montana, has a solution. They have a 24/7 meat vending machine so you can get fresh steak any time.

Daniels Gourmet Meats is run by a third-generation butcher and sausage maker. The shop has plenty of meat on hand during business hours, but the owners wanted to ensure customers have access even after hours. "I think our customer base wants to buy meat after 6 p.m. We're closed Sunday, so it's a great opportunity for our fishermen, skiers, and avid outdoors people to come in before or after hours," owner Austin Daniels told KBZK News.

The machine looks like a typical touchscreen vending machine and is in a closed-off section of the store, accessible from outside. Customers can choose from a selection of sausages, jerky, bacon, and various cuts of steak like New York strip and ribeye. The machine is temperature-controlled with its own compressor and sensors, and stocked with fresh products from the shop daily.

The meat vending machine has been up and running since March 2026, though Austin Daniels had the idea about a year earlier. Whether he was aware or not, this idea has been tried out before. In 2025, a butcher shop in Nebraska was featured on local news for offering three vending machines full of meat including one that stored frozen products. Like Daniels Gourmet, the machines offered meat sticks, sausages, and steaks. Echo Lake Meats in Alaska was doing the same in 2024, and Applestone Meat Company made waves with the idea all the way back in 2018. It still wasn't the originator, however. RJ's Meats in Wisconsin had been trying it out as early as 2017. Similar machines were in use throughout France and Germany even earlier. If you go back to 2011, there was a machine called the Smart Butcher selling steaks at the Lil Mart in Odenville, Alabama.

Despite the proliferation of meat vending machines, they are still rare enough that most people are surprised to learn about them and regard them as a novelty. One comment on the Daniels Gourmet Facebook page read, "It's too early for April Fools, right?" Many others are positive expressions of surprise ranging from "Brilliant" to "This is both fantastic and hilarious."

In a world with vending machines that sell airline food and even attempts that tried (and failed) to make mashed potato vending machines a thing, maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that you can get fresh steaks out of one. If anything, the surprise is that they're not more well known.