About
A small Bend business with one job: make the better snack the easy one.
Cloudchaser Snacks is owner-operated, full-time, and based here. No franchise, no call center, no regional manager three states away.
Who’s behind it
Sydney Fitzgibbons, owner
Cloudchaser Snacks is one person doing every part of the job on purpose. Sydney picks the locations, negotiates the placements, buys the product, drives the route, restocks the machines and answers the email. When you write to Cloudchaser Snacks, you are writing to the person who will be standing in front of your machine on Tuesday.
That is not a limitation we are apologizing for — it is the whole competitive idea. The most common complaint about vending is a machine that sits empty or broken because the operator lives somewhere else and services it when the route happens to swing by. A local owner with a small number of machines does not have that problem.
“I place a machine with protein bars, nuts, jerky and better-for-you drinks — completely free to you — and I handle all the stocking and maintenance.”
Sydney Fitzgibbons, owner, Cloudchaser Snacks
The short version
- Owner-operated in Bend, Oregon
- Serving Bend, Redmond, Sisters and Central Oregon
- Free to host — we buy, stock, service and insure the machine
- Machines serviced once or twice a week
- Month-to-month agreements with a 30-day exit
- Opening our first host locations now
Why Bend
The right town for a machine that isn’t full of candy
Bend is a city of roughly 109,000 people whose weekends are organized around climbing, running, cycling and skiing, and whose weekday schedule is full of gyms, clinics, offices and campuses. It is very hard to find a town more inclined to buy a protein bar on the way out of a workout.
And yet the vending in most of those buildings is what vending has always been: soda, chips and candy, stocked by someone driving in from out of the area. The gap is not that people here would not buy something better. It is that nobody put something better in front of them.
Central Oregon also gives the route somewhere to grow without leaving home. Redmond, Sisters and the corridor between them all have exactly the kind of buildings this works in.
The healthier-vending thesis
Better product costs more per case, which means a healthy machine only works if three things are true at once: the price point holds, the location has the right people walking past it, and the machine is never empty. Miss any one of those and it fails — which is why so few operators bother.
Our whole operating model is built around those three. We are selective about locations, we price like real food, and we run a route small enough to service properly.
How we operate
The standards we hold ourselves to
None of this is exotic. It is just the difference between a machine people rely on and a machine people stop looking at.
Serviced on data, not on memory
Every machine reports its own sales and stock. We restock once or twice a week, and more often when a location earns it.
Same-day response
Any host issue — a jam, a refund, a reader that will not read — gets an answer the same day.
Oldest stock first, always
New product loads behind old, and anything within two weeks of its date comes out of the machine.
Insured, with paperwork
We carry general liability insurance and provide a certificate on request — standard for clinics, campuses and larger employers.
Licensed for what we stock
Before a machine goes in, we confirm licensing for our exact product list with Deschutes County Environmental Health and hold an Oregon food handler card.
Written agreements
Every placement is on paper: who provides power, who owns the machine, who is liable, and how either side walks away.
The name and the mark
Where “Cloudchaser” came from
The name is deliberately not tied to a town. Chasing clouds is what you do here — up a trail, up a wall, up a mountain — and it reads the same in Redmond as it does in Bend, which matters for a business meant to grow past one city.
The mark is Sydney’s own drawing. It was redrawn as true vector artwork so it stays sharp from a browser tab to a full machine wrap, but the design itself is unchanged — the same summit and cloud she sketched. The green in it, Cascade Green, was sampled straight out of that original artwork and is now the brand color everywhere, including on this page.
Want to be one of the first locations?
We are placing our first machines across Bend and Redmond now. Early hosts get first pick of the spot and a direct say in what goes in the machine.