Gaining grounds

Upselling coffee to encourage higher margins comes second nature to the high-street coffee-bar chains such as Starbucks and Costa, with chain hotels and restaurants not far behind. But many operators in the independent hotel and restaurant sector still take the view that coffee is an incidental to the main spend and needs no special attention.

That is the view of David Llanwarne, national sales manager for coffee machine company Azkoyen, who says coffee is not just a service to customers, it is a lucrative profit opportunity which many in the independent sector fail to exploit. "At the end of the night, when the bill is mostly made up of food and wine spend, coffee is almost seen as a complementary comfort to put on the table and forget about," he says. "But coffee is as important a part of the evening's sell as any other part of the dining-out experience."

That is a view shared by Paul Hopkins, managing director of Melitta, who points out the obvious mathematics surrounding the profitability of added-value coffee marketing. His illustration is that a hotel or restaurant selling just 100 cups a day of speciality coffee at £1.40 would translate into a net profit of £36,700 per annum, such is the profit potential from coffee.

An area of the hospitality business where coffee is fast becoming an important part of the sales mix is pubs, which after seeing food sales register huge growth in the past 10 years are now looking to coffee for extra sales.

Hertfordshire-based regional brewer and pub operator McMullens has successfully trialled a new concept in Hertford called Bar Roosh, a mix between bar-brasserie, café-bar and conventional pub. The concept was designed to appeal to far more than customers who just want to sink a few beers and have something to eat at lunchtime and early evening.

Catering development manager Paul Robbins says Bar Roosh is a venue with an offering that can appeal to a wide market at all times of the day. "We open at 9.30am for coffee and snacks instead of 11am, when town-centre pubs usually open. Lunchtime business at Bar Roosh is what you would normally expect, but because it has been designed to be a female-friendly concept, we pick up business in the afternoon for coffee and snacks after shopping," he says.

Such is the success of this positive marketing approach to non-traditional hours and offers in McMullen pubs that coffee sales are around £1,000 a week in very busy units.

While busy pubs can support expensive automatic coffee machines, with Bar Roosh using a Melitta Cafina C60, Robbins says in quieter pubs he is installing smaller coffee pod machines rather than expensive automatic espresso machines to produce quality coffee.

He says they can be set up for under £1,000 in a pub and require no plumbing in. "They give better quality than soluble machines and they don't have the tired taste of pour-and-serve systems where the coffee has been kept warm at the back of the bar," says Robbins.

The quality of coffee is the key to selling more of it, according to Nigel Markey, managing director of Markeys Coffee Bars. "People think all you need to do is get an espresso machine and you have solved the problem," he says. "You need a lot more than that if you want to charge a premium price for your coffee. It takes good staff training to show them exactly how to make a good coffee, things like knowing how much milk to put in a cappuccino and what temperature the milk should be."

While the big coffee-bar chains pay great attention to the blend of coffee they offer customers, Markey says independent operators often make the mistake of thinking that as long as the coffee bean supplier has a name they recognise, then the bean blend and roast must be acceptable.

Markey says nothing could be further from the truth. "If you want to push coffee sales you can't just assume that all coffee beans produce good coffee. The big suppliers have good and not so good. They are serving all ends of the market, those caterers who want absolute quality and those who need to meet a price point."

His advice on selecting the most profitable blend is to taste widely and, if in doubt, go for the milder flavour of 100% arabica beans rather than a blend which has the beefy backbone which comes from a blend including robusta beans.