Setting coffee standards in your café

The specialty coffee industry is becoming increasingly competitive. When coffee drinkers spend their hard-earned money in cafés, they expect the highest quality cup.

Having a set of standards to guide your coffee brewing is integral to maintaining quality in your café. Setting high expectations in both flavour and presentation goes a long way to build trust with customers, reassuring them of the quality they'll receive when they come back.

Your coffee offering

Coffee drinkers have diverse tastes and preferences. An effective in-store coffee offering showcases your expertise across the full coffee spectrum. From reliable, consistent espresso blends, to seasonal drinks and single origins.

At Allpress, we diversify our coffee offering to cater to a wide array of preferences, new audiences and emerging trends in coffee. We offer the café classic milk-based and black coffees, but we introduce seasonal drinks and limited-time flavours to encourage customers to come back to try the latest and greatest.

Serving standards

The presentation of your drinks is just as important as the flavour in the cup. Coffee should not only be delicious but be presented beautifully.

Setting standards around latte art, filter presentation and prep time goes a long way to creating a premium offering. It only takes one bad coffee for a customer not to come back. No matter how busy you might be, only serve coffee you’d be happy to pay money for.

Extras like a tasting card accompanying a single origin coffee are also a nice touch. Chat with your local team to get tasting and info cards on all our coffees.

How to talk about coffee

Coffee can be an intimidating topic for people. With so much information out there, we want to guide people along their coffee journey, no matter how far along they may be. At Allpress, we try not to be too overwhelming to new coffee drinkers, asking more general questions about what overall flavours they might like: “do you prefer a darker roasted coffee or maybe something lighter and fruiter?”. These conversations differ to the ones we have with seasoned coffee drinkers, where we might discuss more in-depth flavour nuances: “Dry cocoa and bitter cooking chocolate vs dark chocolate flavour” – we cater the conversation to the coffee drinker.

When recommending coffee, it’s great having preferred brewing methods that you can guide people towards, but avoid being overly prescriptive and let the customer choose their way.

Workflow and systems

Efficient workflow enables you to consistently deliver top-quality flavour and experiences to your customers. It also gives you space to evolve and grow your offering with the opportunity to introduce single origin filter or espresso options for customers looking to try something different.

It can be simple workflow adjustments like where milk jugs or saucers are placed on the bench, through to larger changes like where the grinder or milk fridge is situated. You’d be surprised at what you can unlock in your café with just a few tweaks.

Need help with workflow in your café?

Barista training

Having a great coffee offering relies heavily on the people who make it. A lack of training can be the difference between a perfectly balanced espresso and a sour mess in a cup.

Training is essential to take your coffee offering to the next level. Allpress wholesale partners get unlimited access to our training workshops to upskill their teams, ensuring they’re making the best coffee possible. Take advantage of our in-house trainers and get your team brewing the perfect cup.

Equipment and machinery

Having high-quality, efficient equipment will enable you to deliver a coffee offering that is both consistent and delicious.

We’ve spent the last 30 years building a strong partnership with La Marzocco and recommend their equipment for any hospitality business looking to brew high-quality coffee. Working with Allpress means you have access to this industry-leading machinery.

Consistency is key

Setting coffee standards and brewing great coffee in your café is key to getting customers back through the doors. Consistently brewing exceptional can take time to master but by having the high standards guiding your offering, you'll be well on your way to becoming your customers' go-to café.