Nanny Caddy vending machines introduced to Phila. region

Vending machines used to be just for candy and condoms. They've evolved.

Slip your cash or credit card into the mouth of a 21st-century big boy, and it can reward you with a digital camera, DVDs, an iPod, a steamy latte, freshly made pizza, and solid gold bars. You have to go to Italy to find the pizza machine, and to Germany for the Gold to Go wafers (in varying weights, with prices adjusted every two minutes for casual investors). The Philadelphia region, however, is home to one of the most practical, why-didn't-I-think-of-that vending machines in existence.

The Nanny Caddy.

During the last several months, the teal-and-purple machines have appeared at the Please Touch Museum, Smith Memorial Playground, Sesame Place, and Dorney Park. They dispense Huggies diapers in small, medium, and large; two kinds of pacifiers; baby wipes; hand sanitizer; a nursing wrap for discreet breast-feeding; sippy cups; diaper-rash ointment; and, compassionately, Tylenol, Advil, and tampons.

The mother of such an invention, as you can imagine, had suffered.

Three years ago, Celena Lentz, a former nurse from Gold Canyon, Ariz., took her 2-year-old son, Luke, shopping at a mall. "He had a poopy diaper, and I had run out," she recalled. There was no drugstore in the mall, so she packed up the stroller to leave.

"He was screaming, and I thought, 'Why isn't there a machine for times like this?' There have been so many times when I was at the mall or the zoo or the museum, and I ran out of diapers or wipes and couldn't buy those things. I looked around at all the moms and thought, 'I can't be the only one this happens to.' And the wheels started turning."

Yes, she said, she knows. Mothers and babysitters ought to be prepared. And when emergencies arise, how hard is it to find a drugstore or ask a stranger pushing a stroller for a spare diaper?

"But it's not so simple," she said. "Babies and children are unpredictable, so you have to flow with that. You have an explosion, and you need more than one. If you're gone for the whole day, you may not have enough."

And, she noted, there are diaper thieves afoot. "I have nieces and nephews. They get into your diaper bag and take stuff out."

Her husband, a building contractor, thought it was a brilliant idea. But Lentz had no business experience and didn't have the slightest idea how she would come up with the money to start such a project. She mulled it over for a year and a half, had another baby, and then, one day last January, at Bible study with her aunt, cousin, and mother, it clicked.

"We were praying," Lentz said. "My aunt said, 'I feel we need to invent something,' and I said, 'Oh, I have the perfect thing.' They said, 'We'll help you.' I kind of got my prayers answered."

Within a few months, a Nanny Caddy was dispensing emergency diapers in Superstition Springs Center, a nearby mall. Lentz sent out fliers to the magazines she found in the pediatrician's office. One responded and wrote an article about her.

And that was how the Philadelphia connection came to be. Shannon FitzGerald, who lives in East Falls, had just had her second baby when she came across the article about Nanny Caddy.

She told her husband, Patrick, about it. He has made it his career to get businesses off the ground. Remember Recycle Bank? It used to supply recycling containers to a few Philadelphia neighborhoods. Each week, households could earn points based on the amount of material they recycled and redeem the points for discounts and coupons from retailers. The company continues to do business in other cities, but after its contract with Philadelphia expired in 2006, Patrick, one of Recycle Bank's founders, began looking for other start-up opportunities.

Nanny Caddy? Brilliant, he thought, so he tracked Lentz down and asked if she wanted help building the business.

Soon, the two of them were sitting in the mall, watching the machine.

"We stayed for an hour or two," Patrick FitzGerald said, "and I realized that it was useful to all walks of life, all ages, economic levels, races. If your kid has a poopy diaper, you're going to buy one. We saw a kid throw a pacifier in the trash. The mom looked around. What am I going to do now? Saw the Nanny Caddy. Oh!"

Back from Arizona, FitzGerald said, "I made 20 phone calls to museums, zoos, amusement parks. I got calls back within 24 hours. It's rare you get that kind of response."

He made some adjustments to the items for sale. "We put in different pacifiers and added some things for the moms. The nursing wraps, hand lotion. A big seller is the Tylenol, Advil, and shots of vodka." (One can dream.)

Now Nanny Caddy's chief executive officer, FitzGerald said the company is making in the five figures and negotiating with major venues such as Walt Disney World and the King of Prussia mall as part of a national expansion.

Please Touch instantly welcomed the Nanny Caddy, considering it a "no-brainer," a museum spokesman said. The machine stands next to the restroom entrance. Last week, it registered only 27 sales, but countless appreciative visits from adults who said they were thrilled to know it would be there when they needed it.

"Well," said Kathy Bailey, a 36-year-old mother of two from Hatfield, "it's about time. . . . I've thought of this before, because a lot of places, you don't have a drugstore nearby where you can get what you need."

"Look at that," said Karen Komoroski, marveling at the contents. "Everything you need that you could have forgot. They have everything now! We had nothing."

Komoroski was taking care of her grandchildren, Madeline, 5, and Nathan, 11 months, for four days while their parents took a well-deserved vacation. "I remember disasters when my kids were babies. I did cloth diapers. We had to wrap them up and run home. And the Nuks! If you forget them, it could be a tragedy."

Aubrey Mortimer, trying to herd her four children, ages 2 months to 6 years, around the museum, came across the Nanny Caddy as if she'd just discovered El Dorado.

"I forget stuff all the time," Mortimer said. "The pacifiers. We're always losing pacifiers. And $4 for a nursing wrap is really good. You don't want to nurse here in front of everybody."

Asked if she thought $2.50 for a single diaper was a good deal, she didn't hesitate.

"If you don't have one, it sure is."

Worth, in other words, its weight in gold.