The total coffee market in the UK, including coffee sold in cafes, coffee-to-go, and consumed at home, is worth £6bn. Put another way, the UK consumes 98 million cups of coffee a day.
While take home coffee has long been a local shop staple, more stores are branching out into take away coffee. It’s proving a great way to drive footfall, and can also be a great driver of basket spend.
Choose the right machine for your store
Coffee machines not only offer consumers warm drinks from well-known brands, but they are also among the best investments made by many retailers.
“Hot coffee to go is a no-brainer – if you have the space, get it in,” says Justin Whittaker, MJ’s Premier in Royston, Greater Manchester. “We installed one with the help of Booker around five years ago, and it cost us £10,000.”
While the technology has advanced since then, at the time, Whittaker researched different companies and decided which ones were suitably straightforward.
“Maintenance was huge for us, and we based our choice on that, even if we had to spend a little more,” he says.
Sasi Patel, owner of multiple convenience stores in Greater Manchester, on the other hand, has a Rijo42 machine, which he got nine years ago.
“We invested around £7,000 on the machine, and got our return on investment within a couple of years,” he says. “We looked at profit, as that’s important to us, followed by maintenance and the free stock bundles that were being offered at the time.”
Cross merchandise to grow basket spend
Whittaker, has found that customers buying a coffee from his store in the morning rarely leave with just a drink.
“Customers never go out empty-handed – it’s never just a coffee,” he explains. “Hot coffee in particular, has become a complete pick me up.”
Make that link purchase easier for your customers by having pastries and other bakery items displayed close to your hot drinks. Alternatively, consider breakfast meal deals. If you don’t have space or resource for fresh bakery, there are alternatives.
“We sell a lot of flapjacks and carb-heavy products with our coffees,” explains Patel. “We sell a lot in the mornings, but we also sell plenty of them at other times.”
How to boost sales from your coffee-to-go machine
If you’re struggling to drive sales of hot coffee with your machine, consider a loyalty scheme.
Whittaker created one through Booker, which used a company called Superior. It is completely bespoke to his store and enables anyone to buy a hot drink for £1 instead of the usual £1.75.
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