How to Increase Coffee Sales

Many hotels now compete with cafés for coffee sales.

Apart from coffee with meals, customers range from informal business meetings and work from home staff getting out of the house, to parents after their school drop off.

While it may not be a large revenue stream, it’s a chance to market your F&B and accommodation offerings. Serving great coffee is also a sign that your meals are also high quality.

Here are a few tips to ensure your coffee is competitive with local cafés.

1. Train staff to make the perfect cup. New staff should work alongside experienced operators. Your suppliers will be able to assist you with training and helping staff understand what makes good coffee.

2. Staff also need to be trained in achieving consistency – at speed.

3. Regularly spot test. But the coffee you order as the owner or manager is always going to be perfect, so you have to be find ways to get past this ‘bias’. For example, have friends drop in at different times and then join them to assess the quality. You also need to order outside your favourite cup so that you can check the quality of your cappuccinos, lattes, long black etc.

4. Source excellent coffee beans. Continue to test new product. If you buy sustainable beans, such as Rainforest Alliance and Australian Certified Organic (ACO), make sure you promote it.

5. Machine maintenance is an important part of being successful. Staff need to know how to properly clean and maintain your machine to achieve peak quality and extend the life of equipment. If your machine is malfunctioning, you should be able to quickly diagnose the problem and fix it so you don’t let customers down.

6. Make sure that staff that have a passion for coffee are assigned the role of barista. Some people love it, some people hate it.