What's the Coolest Mobile Vending Machine?

A few weeks ago, for about three quarters of an hour, it was summer in the UK. Happily that occurred during the weekend of the Latitude festival, for which my wife and I had tickets. Of course, I couldn’t rest easy just drinking in culture and excellent music, somehow I had to crowbar some kind of vehicular interest into the mix.
So I got to looking at the rich variety of mobile purveyors of sustenance that made up the weekends culinary programme. Reasonable facsimiles of food and drink from all over the globe were on offer, a lot of which was dispensed from mobile outlets, at least some of which were vaguely interesting. A brief list of the stand-outs is included below for your perusal, together with a mandatory audience participation exercise.


The Citroen H
I’m about to self-impose a policy of NEVER buying anything from a converted Citroen H van. This is entirely because I’m an awkward, petty asshole who hates having things marketed at me in cutesy, “original” ways.
There was a time when the Citroen H van was largely ignored outside its homeland. Then, one day, somebody with a degree of initiative imported one for use as a mobile coffee van or somesuch. It was brilliant, people loved it, bought millions of cups of coffee and the man retired to the Mediterranean where he now spends most of his time on a 150′ Benetti named “Saucy Sue”. Probably.
Now, though, the Citroen H is bloody everywhere. 0.00003% are still being used as vans, the others are all being used as retro-flavoured mobile food outlets having been converted at enormous expense. There are a number of firms who specialise in outfitting these things, and rare is a day that I drive the M25 without seeing a flat-bed with H’s freshly dug out of French farmyards en rout to restoration into more bloody mobile coffee-vans.
Bollocks to them. I want my Coffee served from a Transit. No, better still, a Freight Rover.

Peugeot J7
Exactly the same principal as above applies here, except for the fact that there are far, far fewer of these doing the rounds than Citroen H’s. Possibly because they’re less recognisable and less obviously French.
We actually bought all our coffee over the weekend from the one photographed above, a) because it was really damn good coffee (and £2.80 for an Americano is actually quite competitive in Festival captive-audience terms) and b) because it wasn’t a bloody H van.
If it had been a Freight Rover I would have paid up to £12 a cup. There’s an interesting business model for anybody interested.

Bedford CA
It would be great if there were more people converting classic British vans like this one into mobile vending vehicles, but it’s never going to happen. Reasons? Well, I suppose a principal one is that there simply aren’t enough classic British vans left to actually do it. The rough ones have mainly been scrapped, the good ones are in the hands of enthusiasts. Restoration projects are rare indeed.
And to be seen as classic a van seems to have to pre-date the Transit, which is a shame because there are more Transits out there than any other van, British or otherwise. Seriously, I would spend £££ for coffee professionally brewed in a ’71 Transit with an Essex V6. Somebody get on it.
There were others at Latitude, including the VW in the lede image which saw that every kid at Latitude spent the whole weekend stuffing their face with free Pringles until they burst showering salt and processed potato across a wide area. There was also the below:

This won my coolest vehicle of show award. It’s a coachbuilt Bedford which previously saw employment by a local council authority as a mobile library, now serving as a mobile bookshop stacked to the ceiling with volumes of far greater literary import than an oik like me can appreciate.
So, I ask you:
A) What’s the coolest vehicle you have ever bought anything from?
And for extra credit:
B) What vehicle would you LIKE to buy something from?
(All images copyright  Chris Haining / Hooniverse 2015)