🔥 Cutting Fixed Costs & Taxes, Faster Coffee Making, ChatGPT & Socials, Menu Fonts, Feedback Techniques, Millennial Needs, Pianists and PizzaTok
Information, Trends & Inspiration for restaurant, cafe & foodservice operators - helping to create a strong, dynamic industry in a fast-changing world. Brought to you by Ken Burgin. Issue #146
✋ Welcome, I’m a former cafe & restaurant owner, hospitality adviser, consultant and coach. Always looking for the latest trends and how-to information - this is where I share it. Find me on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, on the Ken Burgin blog or via the Contact Form… cheers, Ken
🔥 SPECIAL TOPIC PAGES (for Paid Subscribers) - with 400+ sorted articles
* Staff Recruitment & Management (200+)
* Menu Design, Presentation & Pricing
* Menu Sales, Marketing & Trends
* Cost Control, Financial & Fraud Management Resources
* ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence for Hospitality Use
* Easiest Way to Do a Restaurant Newsletter - using Substack
📆 Hospitality Events Calendar - trade fairs, webinars, events and promotions
💥 Last week’s and previous » Newsletters
🕺 Find Me Live - I’m very active in the Profitable Hospitality Owners Group, with regular live Q&A sessions on management, staff, COGS and other hot topics. Join me!
🔪 How to Reduce Restaurant & Cafe Fixed Costs - more flexible than people often think. More than 20 different cost centres covered here. [KB]
😙 Untouchable Family Members - often a problem in a family business.
🌶️ Maximise Restaurant Tax Savings Before June 30 - money saving options. [KB]
👍 Square Payments Update - finally allowing proper credit card surcharges. Finally!
😎 Start With the Font - food critic Jay Rayner’s guide to choosing a good restaurant anywhere.
🍤 Restaurants Facing Harsh Reality - April slump, but restaurants have learnt their lesson from Covid... interesting.
🌮 Show What You’re Eating - and get roasted for it by ChatGPT. Brutal!🔥
🔹 An Accountant on TikTok - built a massive following with her short, practical info nuggets.
🚗 Undercover Millennials Share Retail Stories - great podcast with Bob Phibbs, and so much of it relevant to hospitality.
😳 Macca’s Gives Us ‘Cake-Flavoured Coffee’ - plus free treats for the 30th birthday of McCafe in Australia.
⚙️ Product of the Week: Perfect Moose - milk texturing machine. Great testimonial from Reif Hand of Byron Bay’s Corner Store: ‘We are a takeaway coffee shop: A busy peak hour in the morning where we need extra barista for a hour (not 3-5hrs of a casual shift). Open until 4pm - most good baristas don’t want to work want to afternoons, they’re naturally creatures of the morning (midday to 5pm is hard shift to fill with someone with good coffee experience - plus they don’t like doing the afternoon pack down). More very useful info and photos below…
Employment Reset...
🌐 Orientation - a vital component of onboarding. ‘It’s about putting work into your people…’
💵 Hospitality Employee Tax Deductions – income and work-related deductions from Aust. Tax Office.
📍 16 Tips for a Restaurant Employee Handbook - step by step, and ChatGPT can slash the time to write it.
🔄 14 Effective Feedback Techniques - be more effective and get better outcomes.
Marketing Reset...
🍕 Crazy Popular Pizza TikTok - a massive number of video likes... follows the formula.
💕 How Tinder Can Make You a Better Copywriter - lessons for websites, newsletters and social posts… even menus.
🏴 How Instagram Got Us to the Castles of Scotland - the value of a consistent approach.
Using Tech, ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence
🍒 8 Canva AI Tools - improve your design workflow and productivity.
🥯 ChatGPT Suggests Better Social Posts - Nat with another winning tip.
🤓 Using Google’s Bard - as a research tool to check local competitors.
🚀 All together: ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence for Hospitality Use
Inspiration, Fun and Wider Interests…
👨🌾 If Famous People in History Took Selfies - Joan of Arc, Thomas Edison, Freddie Mercury and lots more.
🎶 Pianist at the Railway Station - ready to play every request.
🇸🇦 Female Tourist's Visit to Saudi Arabia - so many interesting changes.
Perfect Moose setup at Byron Corner Store… thanks Reif Hand
Context of purchase:
We are a takeaway coffee shop who averages 60kg coffee per week over a year. Our opening hours are 6am-4pm 364 days a year. Like all workplaces Australia wide, COVID really affected our ability to find good staff.
With coffee we identified 2 staffing issues:
Peak Hour Coffee demand: Our busiest coffee period for the day is between 8am-9am daily as its when customers are commuting and school dropoff. We often feel that we need an extra support barista for this golden hour each day, but realistically you can’t give an extra barista any less than a 5-hour shift.
Afternoon coffee sales: good baristas are naturally morning creatures, they love to do an early start, produce a lot of coffee and be out the door by early afternoon. It’s been hard to attract good quality baristas for afternoon shifts.
In the last 5 years, we have heavily invested in coffee equipment to both improve the consistency of our coffee and speed up the process. This had included:
Upgrading our coffee machine from a 2 group machine to a 3 group with shot timers
Introducing a PuqPress to insure it’s the same “tamp” every time regarding of the barista, also helping reduce wrist RSI issues in baristas from continually tamping all shift
Upgrading our Mazar grinder to a Izaga GBW grinder with built in dosage scales, insuring the same dose into the portafilter basket every time with no need to weight each dosage manually
With all our coffee shots, weighed, tamped and timed with perfect consistency every time, we wanted to find a similar solution for milk. How do we standardise and speed up the process of coffee milk production and help with our Barista staffing issues?
We purchased a Perfect Moose machine a month ago and it has helped with these two staffing issues. It makes perfect consistent milk every time and has enough flexibility for custom orders (alternative milks, extra hot, etc). For our morning baristas, it’s like having an extra arm. Coffee is such a manual task for a $5 invoice, all these automated functions that can speed it up means we can make more great product with less staff hours. The perfect moose has joined our grinder that has scales built in and includes an integrated PUQ press for our later afternoon coffees, it means our customers are getting quality milk in their coffees, no matter “who is on the machine”. All this tech/automation has really sped up our coffee production and ensured consistency with all coffee shots being weighed, tamped, timed and then the milk being consistent no matter the barista. Really good baristas don’t feel like it’s too automated and amateur ones have all the tools they need to make great coffee.
How it works:
The Perfect Moose sits on the bench and has a similar footprint to a Mazar grinder
You fill your milk jugs as per normal (it’s not a milk delivery system like a i-Milk), The perfect moose acts as another automated steam wand to your existing coffee machine. It can be installed and run off the existing external boiler of a 3 group coffee machine or be installed with its own under bench boiler
The tech that automates the process is a combination of a temperature thermometer, weight scales for measuring Mililitres of milk and RFID tags attached to each milk jug. You program a recipe for each milk jug with a RFID tag attached to it. The recipe includes milk temperature and thickness. The screen on the Perfect Moose also has a “Hot Milk” override button when you put a jug on the machine
The “recipe per jug” system combined with the measuring of milk in the jug and temperature thermometer insures a perfect consistency of milk every time.
After one month of ownership:
Almost anyone can make great coffee at our business.
The barista essentially has an extra arm at their disposal during peak period’s
All our best baristas have embraced the machine as part of the workflow
We feel much more comfortable when having a weaker calibre of Barista on shift for the afternoons
The machine is discrete enough (small on bench footprint) that our customers don’t feel that their coffee is being made by a robot/machine. The human touch is 1st and foremost
Handles all alternative milks perfectly
Criticisms
$9000 is a lot of money for an automated steam wand
Milk jugs because of the RFID chips attached are proprietary and cost more than standard Barista milk jugs
Again because of the RFID chips, the jugs must be hand washed and can’t be washed in commercial dishwashers
More flexibility with the screen software would be handy – a “warm” button would be welcome
Large milk jugs, it’s not as quick as a steam wand on a la Marzocco 3 group machine, not enough to be a deal breaker however
Purchase Price: $8500 + GST (model without external boiler)