Catering or Rental

If you have a coffee shop or mobile coffee cart, a by-product of your business is catering and rental options.

The option to provide catering solutions depends on your menu offerings. The most simplistic catering option uses the to-go-box-of-coffee for groups who want to take coffee to a meeting or the office. You may also be able to include a package deal when they purchase a box of coffee plus some of your pastries.

The box lunch catering option might be worth considering if you have a kitchen and can create sandwiches. These types of catering orders require coordination among management and team members, but can help your coffee shop business grow.

After opening our HOPE Coffee Sunnyvale location, we had several requests from people in Sunnyvale, Texas who wanted to rent the complete coffee shop for meetings or parties. So, we created a couple of rental options.

One option is available for those who just want to use the interior space for a meeting or party. Another option is available for those who want to rent the space and have the coffee bar open as well. This rental option adds more revenue to our bottom line each time it is rented. It was a simple option to offer to the community, and many have used it for wedding rehearsal dinners, birthday parties, graduation parties, team meetings, and family reunions.

You may also be able to rent out separate rooms or spaces during operating hours, depending on the interior layout of your coffee shop.

If you have an easily-transported mobile coffee cart, consider advertising your espresso services for events like weddings or corporate parties. Adding these types of venues during off-hours can help build your local brand and business.

Our sister company, Shiloh Coffee Supply, offers some unique propane-powered espresso machines that allow mobile coffee carts to operate off-grid.

Barista Battle

Seasonal drinks are a great way to create excitement among your loyal customers, and they help to increase your revenue as your customers make their way through tasting all these new drinks each season. It was easy for our team to come up with seasonal drinks for spring, summer, fall, and winter.  Tiring from some of the seasonal drinks, some customers experienced “drink fatigue”.

So, we decided to add a new season, starting in January each year, called “The Barista Battle”. Our baristas are split into teams, creating drinks they believe will sell most during “The Barista Battle.” The tallied daily numbers of each drink sold are then placed on a scoreboard for our customers to see.

This creates a fun environment for both our customers and our team members to see which drink and which team will win the battle.  We then feature the winning drink as a permanent one throughout the rest of the year. We still showcase the last two winners on our menu because our customers love those drinks.

A typical seasonal calendar is to showcase The Barista Battle in January, and then introduce the Valentine drinks in February. The spring drinks often run from March to May followed by the summer drinks that run from June to August. By the time September rolls around people are ready for the fall drinks that will run through November. December kicks off winter drinks,  some of which will be featured through early January.

We have found The Barista Battle to be a fun way to experiment with different types of drinks. The Battle engages our team members and our community in a friendly competition. You can peruse the Instagram posts for HOPE Coffee DTS and HOPE Coffee Sunnyvale to see the creative barista battle drinks throughout the years.

The Puq Press

Increased speed equals increased opportunity with The Puq Press.

A few years ago, as we were preparing to open our second coffee shop, I took a class at the Texas Coffee School.  In that class, I observed a piece of equipment that would solve several staff training issues and one operational issue.

The issue?  Consistent and level tamping of espresso into the portafilter. One of the most important parts of pulling a quality draw is a tightly packed, even espresso puck. Maintaining a consistently perfect tamp throughout the day is difficult for any barista, let alone across multiple team members.

The solution?  A simple automatic tamper device called The Puq Press. After grinding the espresso into the portafilter, our team member simply places the portafilter onto the forks and waits 2 seconds.  During those 2 seconds, The Puq Press automatically tamps the espresso with the correct pressure into a perfectly level puck ready to pull the perfect espresso shot.

This simple device has certainly allowed our team to increase the quality and consistency of each espresso shot. However, it has also allowed us to decrease the amount of time it takes to create our customer’s drink.  The faster your team makes a drink, the more drinks per hour they can create.  This ultimately means that you can serve more customers per hour with fewer employees and lower labor costs. 

The Puq Press makes it possible for your team to generate more profit for your coffee shop while consistently serving quality espresso based drinks. For more information on this and other products for your coffee shop, contact HOPE Coffee’s sister company, Shiloh Coffee Supply.

Coffee Plus Something

Coffee plus something maximizes profits! Most people who open a coffee shop have several goals in mind.  These goals often include making a decent living from the profit, providing great jobs for those in the community, and building a reputation for a great place to work, have meetings or just hang out with friends.

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you will probably need to provide coffee plus something to increase your revenue to meet your goals.  Some coffee shops choose to add food, other types of drinks, creative products such as plants or other merchandise, membership clubs, or even renting out portions of their interior space.

In our second coffee shop in Sunnyvale Texas, we decided to add made-to-order breakfast tacos, breakfast sandwiches, as well as grilled sandwiches that could be served throughout the day.  This required us to find a chef who could manage the kitchen and train our staff to help prepare and serve food.  These food items represent about 30% of our monthly revenue.  It was well worth adding breakfast tacos to our menu!

Tea and Other Coffee Alternatives

Have you considered offering tea and other coffee alternatives in your coffee shop? When we helped start HOPE Coffee in 2010, I didn’t drink coffee.  In fact, I didn’t like the taste of coffee.  I partially blame this on my parents who drank Folgers, just like everyone else in the 70s and 80s.  However, when I tasted the single-origin specialty-grade Honduran coffee, I was hooked.  It tasted better than any coffee I had ever tried.

However, even if you serve great tasting coffee, you will have customers who either don’t like the taste of coffee or who would prefer a different type of drink.  This is where tea and other drink alternatives are very helpful to have on your menu.  HOPE Coffee carries the high-quality tea line from Compassion Tea, which supports the mission of CompasioNow.

We use these tea options to create several different tea lattes. The London Fog (made from Earl Grey tea, vanilla syrup and steamed milk) and the Cinnamon Orange Spice Tea Latte (Cinnamon Orange Spice Tea, cinnamon and caramel syrups and steamed milk) are both customer favorites at HOPE Coffee Sunnyvale! You may also want to add a high-quality iced black or green tea to your menu.  Another crowd favorite is the tea lemonade made from Compassion Tea’s Green Peach Apricot and lemonade.

By utilizing hot tea, iced tea and tea lattes, your menu selection can expand or nearly double to include items that most of your customers will enjoy.  In your cold case, you may want to carry a few varieties of soda, sparkling water, juices (which are great for kids) and athletic drinks.  These alternative drink selections will help to increase your sales, since nearly everyone who comes into your coffee shop can find something that they enjoy.

The People That You Hire

Your coffee shop will be known by the people that you hire to be part of your team.  These baristas represent your brand, and your customers will associate your brand with your team members.  While you spent your time and money preparing and opening a coffee shop, your team members will influence the reviews that your customers will leave your coffee shop on Google, Yelp or social media platforms.  This is why it is so important to hire and train team members who will represent your brand well.

While there are many articles available on how to interview and hire great people, I’d like to focus on the process of finding and scheduling great team members.  Being a barista is a highly coveted job among young people, so you will likely have numerous candidates from which to choose if you can get the word out that your coffee shop is hiring.

The easiest way to find great team members is to ask your current team members for recommendations.  The second easiest way is to recruit from within your customer base.  We use joinhomebase.com as our team scheduling tool, but it also has a job posting function that allows you to post your opening on social media and other job posting sites.  We have used this tool to create a QR code that we include on a “Now Hiring” type of poster that we placed by our entry doors.  This has allowed our customers to text a picture of it to their friends who often will click through and fill out the online application.  This has created a database of potential team members for our manager to consider when it is time to hire a new team member.

During the interview process, you will be looking for those who will fit well on your team.  This potential team member is also often looking for a coffee shop environment that will work well for them.  To create that mutually beneficial environment, we choose to treat our team members like we would want to be treated by creating a work schedule that is dependable.  Instead of creating a work schedule that changes every week, we determined that, as much as possible, we would create a consistent base schedule for a 2-4 month period of time.

While the base schedule remains constant, the team members may choose to trade with others for differing reasons.  We found that by creating a predictable schedule for each team member, our team members not only trusted our management more, but it also allowed our team members to build stronger relationships with our customers, which has helped to increase our sales.

Iced and Frozen Drinks

When you think about owning and running a coffee shop, your initial focus is on the espresso machine, lattes, and latte art. Have you considered iced and frozen drinks, though? These very profitable items will likely make up 20%-30% of your sales.

Iced lattes are simple to create and easy to implement with good procedures.  You will need ice from an ice machine or bags of ice. Fill the cup half way with ice.  Pour milk over the ice leaving about 3 oz. of room at the top of the cup.  The key step is to add the syrups to the hot espresso, and then stir or whisk the syrups and espresso so that it is well mixed before pouring it over the iced milk.

Blended or frozen lattes require ice, milk, espresso, and syrups plus an emulsifier that will bond the milk to the ice and create the creamy texture of a frozen latte.  When all those ingredients are added to a high-powered commercial blender (similar to the Blendtec Stealth), the result is very satisfying and visually appealing when you top it with whip and drizzle.

For more ideas on seasonal iced and frozen drinks, visit HOPE Coffee Sunnyvale’s Menu! Each season our menu changes to reflect the flavors of that time of year. Pumpkin in the fall, coconut in the summer, peppermint and cinnamon in winter. Not only will your customers be looking for these flavors, but the change in the menu will maintain excitement each time they return.

Cold Brew:
Refreshing and Profitable

Are you wondering where to start with cold brew for your coffee shop? It isn’t as complicated as you may think.

“Give me the simple life” is not only a fun song to hear, but it is what most people want when they start a coffee shop.  However, the hectic nature of finding and training staff, procuring supplies, and making menus can often be overwhelming.  The beauty of the cold brew option is one that provides both simplicity and profitability in a very simple drink.  While it can take 12-24 hours to make, you can refrigerate it up to two weeks, giving you time to sell the cold brew you created.

Cold brew coffee is NOT the same as iced coffee, which is hot coffee that has been chilled and poured over ice.  The process of making cold brew for your coffee shop results in a less acidic version of your favorite roasts!  While any type of coffee can be brewed using this method, lighter – medium roast coffees tend to work the best.  We highly recommend our own Honduran Medium Roast Coffee for a full, rich flavor, or our Mexican Light Roast Coffee for a light, easy-to-sip beverage. You will find that this cold brew method brings out different flavors and notes than when brewed in the traditional hot method.

Since there is very little waste with cold brew, it provides huge profit margins for your coffee shop, which ultimately will help your bottom line.

To make cold brew for your coffee shop, you can use a 5-gallon Cold Brew system like this one from Toddy.  You can choose to make either a cold brew concentrate or a ready-to-drink cold brew.  A concentrate is often chosen for those who will be serving it over ice so that as the ice melts the cold brew doesn’t become watered down.  A ready-to-drink option is often chosen if you have a dispenser that keeps the cold brew chilled which allows for less ice to be used in the cold brew.

To make a cold brew concentrate use one of the following cold brew recipes:

• 2 lbs. of ground coffee +  1.25 gallons of cold water
• 5 lbs. of ground coffee + 3 gallons of cold water

To make a cold brew ready to drink option, use one of the following cold brew recipes:

• 2 lbs. of ground coffee + 2.5 gallons of water.
• 4 lbs. of ground coffee + 5 gallons of cold water.

Once you have added cold water to your coffee grounds, let it steep for 12-24 hours before putting into another container for serving.  Be sure to refrigerate the cold brew each evening so it can retain its freshness and flavor as you serve it to your customers.

For more information, and even a simple recipe for your home, check out HOPE Coffee’s Cold Brew Coffee Page.