Make money on coffee: How to Start Selling Coffee

HOW TO RUN A CAFE THAT MAKES SENSE

Coffee is absolutely indispensable and also common in people's lives today. Just look around you. There are plenty of opportunities in your vicinity where you can have a coffee. These places are, in terms of business, your competition. Whether directly or indirectly. We won't go into competitor analysis completely right now; we discussed this topic, as an important part of your business plan, in this article.

WHEN I GROW UP, I'LL BE A COFFEE SHOP OWNER...

Knowing the competition around us, let's now try to focus on our own originality. Something that will increase competitiveness. Assume you want to sell coffee for many personal reasons:

• you want to make money
• you want a job that you enjoy and coffee is what you enjoy
• you like coffee and you want to do business
• you like to make coffee for your friends, so you want to offer this service to other people
• you like the idea of having a coffee shop
• a coffee shop is a modern business
• and many of your other subjective motivations...

Now think about what is the point of opening a coffee shop for others - your future customers. What are their needs and what can you bring to them by owning your own business? Please don't answer that coffee. As we said above, coffee is brought to them by many businesses today.

Personas or how to understand customers

See coffee as the main means of meeting the needs of your prospective customers.

To help you better gauge your customers' needs, create typical customer representatives, or personas. Write on paper or on your computer a description of the people who will visit you. Feel free to include illustrative photographs, for example from the Internet, with your descriptions. They will be easier to describe when you see them.

BUSINESS AS A (NON)CAFÉ

When choosing a persona, take into account the planned location of the business, what you want to sell and what the design of your café will be. Define the needs of the personas you create - your target group. From this information, try to work out how to meet their needs in terms of selling coffee. As a result, you may find that the intersection of your personal reasons (why you want to sell coffee) and the needs of your customers may lead you to create a different type of business than a coffee shop.

Selling coffee can be done in a different way than a traditional coffee shop. People today want to drink coffee more often and almost everywhere they go. They want to have coffee on the way to work, on a walk, on a picnic, on the way to the post office, while driving in the car, while shopping. Just always and everywhere. These are exactly the needs you can meet for your customers.

KIOSK WITH COFFEE

You can make money selling coffee in a shopping centre. It's a place where many people flow in every day and you can reach them with your coffee. You can offer them a place to sit and relax while they shop, or create a kiosk - a sales stand where you offer "coffee to go". The speed of service and the sale of coffee by the cup will become a popular service for those whowant coffee but don't want to stop. They want good coffee to go.

You can make a profit with the coffee-in-a-cup style of service in other busy places. In the city centre or in another busy part of town, or perhaps in a local favourite park. Inaddition to a fixed stand, you can also use theconcept of a mobile café and basically commute to your customers with your coffee. During the week, you will stay in a park near the square, for example, and at the weekend you will move to a place in a relaxation zone, for example, by the river or near a cycle path.

ADVANTAGEOUS INTERDISCIPLINARY COOPERATION

Merging two different businessescan be an interesting concept . Do you have a florist friend? Try to find premises that are suitable for combining the two businesses. You will complement each other. Customers will go for coffee and buy a new room service at the same time. Combining a coffee shop with a small home accessories or gift shop can also work nicely. Think about locating the café in a gallery, library, antique shop or yoga studio.

IF A CAFÉ, THEN THOUGHTFUL IN EVERY DETAIL.

If running a traditional café seems like the best way to do business, bring something interesting here too. Create a café that is linked in concept to the place in which it is located. It could be a café in a village in a traditional country style, a café near a nursery and focused on the women's favourite Provence style, or an espresso bar in an urban style and located in a modern building in the city centre.

Your café responds to a particular theme, such as ecology and sustainability, so in a café like this you emphasise minimising the use of plastic, using ingredients from local producers and aiming for a zero waste operation. Or the café is a relaxed place where hygge elements are applied. Everything in the café, be it its design, décor, menu, crockery and service, must fit together, complement each other, form a unified concept of the café.

STEP BY STEP TO THE CAFÉ OF YOUR DREAMS

Do you have a well-thought-out concept with a unique selling point that is the reason why customers come to you? Great, now we can move on to the next steps leading to your successful café. Take this idea of yours and plan it into your "action plan" i.e. business plan. In this document you will clarify how you will build your café step by step.

BUSINESS PLANNING

In addition to the aforementioned competitor analysis, break down thenecessary costs to build and equip your café. Add in the costs of operation (rent, utilities,...), materials, staff, unexpected expenses and marketing. This article will help you with this point of your business plan, but also our individual coffee technology financing service. Not only will we advise you on which coffee machine or grinder (and other equipment) to buy, but we will also devise a financing system specifically for you to help you with the financial costs of starting your business .

So you know where, what, who, why and how you will sell. You know the other players in the market and how much money you need for your business. Think about what legal form of business you will choose and whether you meet the requirements for your chosen trade or whether you will need a guarantor for your trade - hospitality. Create your marketing strategy, how you will speak to your customers and through what channels. Think through what opportunities and risks your business will bring using a SWOT analysis. Finally, translate your plan for building your café into a timetable.

THE PATH TO A SUCCESSFUL CAFÉ

A successful café offers a quality product range. This quality should be consistent, no matter who is currently on shift. Therefore, in addition to quality ingredients, have trained staff. A powerful coffee machine, grinder and well-chosen barista equipment balances out the slight differences between your baristas. They guarantee the quality and stability of the product. Therefore, do not hesitate to contact us not only with the delivery of quality roasted coffee, but also with the selection of the coffee machine and grinder for your establishment and with the training of your staff.

ERGONOMIC EQUIPMENT

If you don't have much practical experience working behind the bar, we can also help you with ergonomic bar placement and equipment. An ill-considered layout of bar equipment significantly slows down and reduces the efficiency of your staff. We know the rules of layout and we also have the necessary years of experience working in a café. We can design your bar to support your baristas and improve as well as speed up your operational processes.

LOYAL CUSTOMERS

Every successful café eventually develops a fan base, its loyal customers, the so-called regulars. You can support and accelerate this process by, for example, introducing loyalty cards. Your guests will be pleased to know that by regularly buying coffee from you they will receive certain benefits, such as an eighth free coffee. Traditionally, loyalty cards can be paper-based or you can use modern technology. Have a mobile app created that your customers can download to their phones and simply scan a code to add an extra bonus point, for example. They then redeem these for a cup of coffee.

COFFEE FOR THE BOARDROOM

Another way to drive sales and interest in your café is through coffee delivery service. Breakfast boxes from cafes are becoming a trend and especially coffee cattering at events, weddings and in larger cities theso-called coffee breaks are very popular. Offer your customers this service. They order refreshments from you in advance for their planned company meeting and you deliver them.

Coffee breaks are often unattended, so it is up to you to make the refreshments, deliver them, serve them and take them away again after the meeting. Themain advantage of this service is that youknow the order in advance. Depending on the size of the order, you can then plan the number of staff needed to make it yourself and, if necessary, arrange for on-site service if the order also includes a barista to prepare espresso and milk coffee drinks.

PUBLIC COFFEE TASTINGS

One of the low-key yet so popular coffee shop events that attract coffee lovers from all over the area is cupping - coffee tasting. This will highlight the current coffee offer, point out the differences in taste between coffees and enrich your customers with new knowledge and experience in the coffeeselection. You can organise such a cupping yourself if you feel up to it, or contact us and we will present our coffees to your customers in this interesting way. We will guide them through the coffee flavours and talk about the journey of coffee from seed to cup.

SALES CORNER

Your café can act as a "specialty coffee shop", a shop specialising in the sale of coffee and accessories. You don't have to immediately think about renting another room full of shelves like in traditional shops. The coffee shop offerspackages of coffee beans and accessories for coffee preparation as a complementary sale. Even just one shelf with this offer will be easily accessible for customers to choose from. Rotate the coffee on the shelf so that your customers always have a choice of fresh coffees.

OTHER WAYS OF DOING BUSINESS WITH COFFEE

You can sell packages of roasted coffee without a coffee shop, for example as a health food and natural products retailer. If selling coffee becomes a sideline (service )for you, such as in the aforementioned coffee shop, take advantage of modern technology and save time by preparing coffee. You can devote it to your customers and primarily to selling your goods. A powerful automatic coffee machine prepares the coffee for you and in the highest quality. We can recommend Nuova Simonelli coffee machines . The cost of such a machine will soon pay for itself, especially when you consider that these machines are almost self-service.

MODERN COWORKING CENTRES

Automatic coffee machines also have their place when it comes to selling coffee in the increasingly popular coworking centres. People have taken a liking to these places, working in shared spaces, sharing to make the most of the offices they've built. Every coworking space should also have a café or coffee corner, so there's a place for your coffee business too. If, for example, you don't go for building a complete café in these workplaces due to space constraints, you can create arefreshment corner with an automatic coffee machine. For larger operations, which shared office buildings certainly are, we recommend Mellita automatic coffee machines .