The following advice is offered to businesses that wish to provide coffee as part of their customer service.

The cost of a cup of coffee consists of more than the ingredients and the coffee machine. In order to get a fully integrated picture of the cup costs, one needs to add costs for brewing time, cleaning time, waste of coffee, service and maintenance costs, machine depreciation, machine financing costs, filter papers and other cost elements which might be invisible to the eye. Even, unfortunately, theft is a cost to include. All these ‘hidden costs’ have to be taken into account!

Coffee should not only be viewed as an additional cost but rather as a way of improving business results and customer satisfaction.

Therefore, rather than comparing coffee suppliers and systems just on costs, view them from the standpoint of: ‘how can I achieve the best business result with this?’ For tips, please look at our recipes and sales tips sections.

The coffee systems made by Douwe Egberts will offer a fully transparent insight into the costs of your coffee service and will be a great help to you in making more money on your coffee sales!

Questions

1 What are the direct costs of a cup of coffee?
2 What are the indirect costs of a cup of coffee?