Corporate Coffee Vending Services - Cut Costs, Reduce Hassles and Increase Staff Satisfaction

As a corporate manager responsible for keeping costs down while keeping staff happy, you may well ask "what can I do to reduce my hot beverage expenditure without reducing quality or placing quantity restrictions on staff.

The answer may be to look at outsourcing your corporate hot beverage service. A corporate coffee vending machine service will save you the hassle of managing the day to day purchase of milk, coffee, tea, sugar and all the other consumables needed to keep the staff happy. More than this though, the coffee machines and even staff needed to manage the service, can be supplied as required.

Coffee vending machines can provide various types of beverages. Our coffee machine range includes coffee machines that dispense instant coffee or bean-to-cup coffee (new technology that allows the beans to be ground and the coffee extracted at the push of a button) and other hot beverage vending machines that can make tea. All can offer hot chocolate and beverages such as chocochino, cappuccino and latte. In other words, you can also increase the range of hot beverages very easily with coffee vending machines.

So what about the service? This depends on you. At a minimum you will need to insist on a coffee vending service that provides repair or replacement of any faulty machines within 8 hours. Then you can decide on whether you want to have your consumables delivered for one or more of your staff to fill the machines and do basic emptying of driptrays and spent coffee grounds, or have vending staff supplied by the vending service provider. This will very much depend on the size of your company and how many staff will use the machines. For larger operations, having a vending assistant(s) on site will help reduce costs as they will manage the consumables and take away any and all responsibility for cleaning and maintaining the machines from your staff. We also find that sites with vending assistants have fewer maintenance issues as the vending assistants are well trained and have frontline technical knowledge.

Saving money? Without a doubt. Most companies report savings arising from portion control, the reduction in theft of consumables and as the milk powder is contained in the machine, fresh milk consumption (often in breakfast cereal!) drops dramatically. In our eight years of providing coffee vending machines to corporates, we have never found the same consumption after installing coffee machines that was reported prior to this step. The reason is that with better portion control, you remove the "heaped teaspoon" effect and of course who knows what percentage of the sugar, tea bags and coffee used to end up in the homes of some staff! Clearly a fair amount! In one company, we calculated from their stated consumable purchases that each person was drinking eight cups of coffee a day! Eishhh....either a very buzzing company or one that had quite a few "take aways!"

Having all the consumables locked away in the coffee vending machine, and an electronic counter of cups dispensed, really does limit consumption...never mind the improved look and feel of a pause area where there is no sugar, milk etc lying out on the counter.

How do you pay for this? There are many different plans and these are negotiated to suit specific circumstances. Some companies prefer to pay for each machine and buy the consumables separately, whereas others prefer a "per-cup-consumed" cost. The latter works best where the service is fully outsourced and the only real interaction you as a manager have with the beverage service, is when the coffee machine readings are taken (each cup dispensed is recorded by an onboard computer) and you receive the monthly billing. If this is not less than you were paying, or you are not receiving a larger range of beverages (yes hot chocolate is a great morale booster but it can cost more than coffee, so you have to decide what you really want for your staff) then coffee vending services may not be for you. What could be simpler?

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