5 Elements When Choosing Your Cafe’s Daily Driver
If you want to be serving the Best Coffee in Adelaide (or where ever you’re based), here are a few key factors to consider.
Your house blend is the heart of your coffee operation. If you want to be known to your customer as serving the best coffee in Adelaide (or where ever you’re based), giving a bit of thought to the following key elements is going to help you steer your brand straight towards your ideal customer.
It’s not about you, it’s about your customer.
Yes, you’re going to drinking your coffee every day, and yes you damn well want to enjoy it. However it’s your customers who are going to pay you for that privilege. They pay your rent, your wages and keep your lights on. So it’s so important that you factor them in above all else, even your own taste buds.
So who is your customer and what do they like?
When we ask this, we don’t mean who is each and every individual one of them. But more so, who represents them on the whole? Or failing that, who is the absolute ideal customer that you want to be serving day in and day out. Build your coffee program around them.
Are they more likely to order a gin & tonic at the bar, or a beer? Are they more keen on a pie & chips than a sit down meal at an expensive restaurant? Or are they going to seek out that new stall at the farmers markets because they’re the first to be making or serving a whole new style of cuisine? All of this will help you paint a picture for your ideal customer.
Special side note here; if there’s not enough if this hypothetical person you may need to shift to another hypothetical person, or broaden your scope depending on the type of market you exist in. But it’s important to be able to know who this customer avatar is and what they enjoy.
How many coffees a day will your ideal customer be drinking? How many coffees per visit will they be ordering?
Your cafe might be the sort of place that gets people their morning cuppa and sends them on their way. Or, it might be the sort of loungey space that encourages people to hang around and spend their whole afternoon in.
If your customer is likely to be only having one coffee in a day, it’s likely they want to feel like “they’ve had a (strong) coffee”. Lighter roast profiles might just not cut it. And the same can be said simple blends that don’t offer much depth of flavour. For this sort of customer you may want to consider a coffee blend that’s a bit heavier and rounded, with good depth and a lingering finish. They’ll feel like they’ve had their coffee and are all set to tackle the day ahead.
Conversely, if they’re likely to sit about you want to maximise the chances of selling them a second cup by offering a blend of coffee that’s not too heavy and finishes with a sweet finish. As they’re getting close to finishing this cup (but not quite done yet), a tactile question of “would you like another cup?” will result in an increase of up to 30% of extra sales.
Are you serving just one blend of coffee, or do you have other (coffee) options available?
Single origins, guest roasters, seasonal coffees or multiple blends? The more options you’re serving, the more niche you can be with your house blend. If it’s not the perfect solution for your customer that’s fine, you likely have something else up your sleeve.
If you’ve decided to serve just one blend of coffee then it’s even more important that it ticks more of the other boxes in this article.
Sure, that’s all great but what does your brand stand for?
Is your brand all about innovation and pushing boundaries? Or does it represent something classic, stable and consistent?
There a million different values that represent your brand and what you stand for. Leaning in on these values will make it easy to choose a blend or style of coffee that represents who you are and what you’re about.
There’s no one size fits all, and that precisely why each of our blends is distinct and there to serve a different area of the market. They’re all delicious in their own right, but it’s a case of finding the right kind of delicious for you and your brand.
