Catering and Rental

One way to increase profit at your coffee shop is to add event rental and catering options. This can be as simple as renting a small area of your coffee shop for meetings and catering to-go coffee boxes and pastries. Additionally, you can rent out your entire space after hours for parties and cater meals depending on your kitchen’s capabilities. These options provide additional hours for staff, increase sales, and introduce your coffee shop to party guests.

We currently provide several different rental options at our Sunnyvale coffee shop location. First, we have a nook behind a shelving unit with a few tables and comfortable chairs that we offer as a free reservation option. This spreads the word about our shop, fills a small section of our space, and leads to additional drink purchases. Most often customers reserve that space for meetings, Bible studies, and small parties. We do not offer this area for reservations on Friday and Saturday mornings as that is our busiest time, and we need all our seating available.

Next, we offer rental of our entire space after hours and on Sundays (we are closed on Sundays). There are three different options when they rent our entire space:

1. Option 1: Customers can bring their own catering and simply host their event in our space with one of our employees available to help and oversee building logistics.
2. Option 2: Customers can pay for an open coffee bar to serve guests at their party. By purchasing a discounted gift card prior to the event, their guests’ drink costs are covered throughout the event. This prepaid gift card guarantees enough sales to cover barista wages and product costs, whether or not they spend all of it during the event. This option also provides extra hours for our team.
3. Option 3: Customers receive rental space, as well as catering. We have an excellent chef that makes made-to-order breakfast tacos and sandwiches every morning. He also provides catering for events when requested. Customers typically choose one of these three full-rental options for large events. The most common are wedding rehearsal dinners, birthday parties, graduation parties, baby showers, family reunions, and office parties.

In order to advertise for catering and event rentals, we hang signs on our doors with QR codes that link to our catering and event rental forms. We also promote it on social media and add an advertisement on our customer facing POS screens. Lastly, we reach out to local schools and advertise our space as a great venue for graduation parties. Most of our exposure comes from word of mouth, so we do our best to chat with our customers about it verbally as well.

Adding event rental and catering options to your coffee shop is great for increasing sales. However, it also expands your reach and provides additional hours for your team. You can customize your rental and catering experience to fit your coffee shop’s capability as well. If you have a *mobile coffee cart, advertising your coffee services for events like weddings or corporate parties is also a great option for increasing sales. Visit our website to learn more about our event rental and catering services!

*Our sister company, Shiloh Coffee Supply, offers some unique propane-powered espresso machines that allow mobile coffee carts to operate off-grid. Visit our site to learn more!

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Barista Battle and Seasonal Drink Ideas

It is important for coffee shops to add seasonal drinks to their menus. They provide variety, anticipation, and increase sales. We also enjoy doing something unique and fun once a year in addition to our seasonal drinks. We call it the Barista Battle! Our baristas get excited each year when it comes around, and our customers love it. It strengthens the team, creates a fun environment for customers, and boosts sales.

When we create our seasonal drink menus, we add two espresso-based drinks, and one non-coffee drink. Offering a non-coffee drink allows you to cater to a broader audience. Within the two espresso-based drinks, we ensure one of them is a crowd-pleaser and not too outside the box with flavors. Then, we add a second that is more creative. This also helps to cater to a larger audience. When crafting your seasonal drink recipes, it is also best to keep the amount of syrup and sauce about the same for each recipe. This ensures you have consistent sweetness levels across your menu.

Our Favorite Seasonal Drinks

Spring: Honey Caramel Latte, Chocolate Covered Strawberry Mocha, Sweet Lavender Tea Lemonade

Summer: Toffee Brownie Mocha, Roatan Island Latte, Mango Green Tea Lemonade

Fall: Pumpkin Spice Latte, Blackberry Cobbler Latte, Spiced Caramel Apple Cider

Winter: Peppermint Mocha, Gingerbread Latte, Spice Caramel Apple Cider

Barista Battle Steps

We also look forward to our Barista Battle each January! Here is how it works:

1. We divide our baristas into teams (we recommend 3-4 teams), and each team creates a drink recipe for the manager to test and tweak to fit our recipe style.
2. Once the drinks are ready, we add them to our menus and begin fun promos on our social media and in our shop.
3. At the end of each day during the competition, the manager tallies up the number of drinks sold using Toast. Then they send the totals to the team who updates our fun, customer-facing score board.
4. We give periodic scoring updates on social media to maintain the excitement.
5. At the end of January, whichever drink we sold the most of wins and stays permanently on our menu under the “Barista Battle Winners” section.
6. The winning team receives a fun prize!

The past few winning drinks at our Sunnyvale location were a White Chocolate Lavender Mocha, French Toast Latte, and Toasted Butterscotch Latte.

While we leave room for our baristas to get creative with their drink ideas, it is important to have guidelines for the Barista Battle drinks to ensure you are still providing high quality products that appeals to your audience and adds something new to your menu.

Barista Battle Guidelines

First, we require that it be a brand-new recipe rather than changing the name of an existing drink. It also needs to be different from current recipes. Next, they cannot repeat any past Barista Battle drinks. It also must be latte-based so that we can offer each drink at the same price. For example, if one team chose a matcha and another team chose a lemonade, we would need to sell them at very different price points which would create an unfair advantage in the competition. Lattes also allow versatility as lattes come hot, iced, and frozen.

While creativity is great, if it is too outside-the-box, it will likely not sell as well and thus lower our profits and their chances of winning. An example of this was our Spicy Mocha from several years ago. During that Barista Battle, very few people were brave enough to try it, so the Spicy Mocha sadly lost. It is best to aim for a crowd pleaser!

Next, each drink ideally uses our current syrups and possibly one new flavor at most. This prevents us from needing to purchase more than three or four new syrups (inevitably some new syrups will not work, but we like to try a few). Lastly, we allow each team three chances to experiment with their drink. This prevents each team from using too much product in experimentation. We allow our team a free drink at each shift, and they are welcome to use that drink to experiment as well.

Once they have a drink idea, they send their recipe to the manager. The manager ensures that the recipe will sell well, and they also tweak the recipe to fit our recipe guidelines. This prevents one drink from being overly sweet in comparison to another. We typically begin the drink testing phase one month prior to the Barista Battle in order to finalize drinks and prepare new menus and POS buttons.

Both seasonal drinks and the Barista Battle build anticipation amongst both baristas and customers. If you would like to peruse our seasonal drinks or past Barista Battle drinks, here is a link to our HOPE Coffee Melissa, HOPE Coffee Sunnyvale and HOPE Coffee DTS and Instagram accounts.

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The PuQ Press

Increased speed equals increased opportunity with The PuQ Press.

In order to create consistent, high quality espresso shots, it is important to understand each component. Small variables can affect the espresso shot significantly. These variables include:

• Grinder settings (which affects the size of the espresso grounds)
• Amount of espresso in the portafilter
• Cleanliness of the portafilter and espresso head
• Pressure and evenness of the tamp
• Length of pre-infusion
• Temperature of the water

One of the most difficult components to perfect and keep consistent among employees is the tamping process. Thankfully, we found an easy solution to this!

Normally, with a manual tamper, you must place it over the espresso grounds in the portafilter, press down with forty pounds of pressure, and push down evenly so that the surface of the espresso grounds is level. These steps ensure that the espresso grounds are tightly and evenly packed so that the espresso machine extracts the espresso evenly (which affects the taste). Unfortunately, it is difficult to press down with exactly forty pounds of pressure, especially with varying strength levels and heights of employees. Tamping evenly is also difficult to do, especially during a rush. When we opened our second coffee shop with a larger staff and much larger demand, we knew we wanted to create a system that would prevent as much variation in the quality of the espresso as possible.

This is when we discovered an automatic tamping device called The PuQ Press. After grinding espresso into the portafilter, tapping the portafilter once on the counter and smoothing the bed of espresso, you simply set the portafiler on the PuQ Press and wait two seconds for perfectly tamped espresso. You can adjust the pressure of this device to exactly forty pounds, thus eliminating any variants in pressure. In addition, the automatic tamper tamps the espresso evenly every time. With this device, your espresso shots increase in quality and your process becomes faster and easier. It also eliminates the occasional necessity to remake an espresso shot due to incorrect tamping.

The PuQ Press is also easy to clean and maintain and handles high volume coffee shops wonderfully. It is important to use a small brush to dust off any espresso grounds from the metal tamper on the device a few times throughout the day to keep it clean. In addition, there is a button that lowers the tamper for easy cleaning at the end of the day. Our baristas maintain our PuQ Presses well and enjoy this step-saving process. We usually have several hundred drink orders each day, and our PuQ Presses handle the large volume with ease.

We highly recommend the PuQ Press for your coffee shop both to increase your drink quality and to increase your sales. It was well worth the investment for us, and we are thankful we found this option. For more information on the PuQ Press and other products for your coffee shop, visit HOPE Coffee’s sister company, Shiloh Coffee Supply.

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