Sandwich Shop
As they share many of the same demands and nuances, please also refer to the 'Coffee Shop' article for general details on the advantages of using a commercial Star espresso machine in your sandwich shop.
An attribute which is important in a coffee shop but paramount in a sandwich shop however, is the extended 'drop'. As the vast majority of sandwich business is take-away, and usually all at once in the morning and lunchtime rushes, the ability to offer great take-away coffee quickly and efficiently is hard to overstate.
It is often efficiency which determines the success of a busy, central sandwich shop. Anyone can fill a town centre sandwich shop at lunchtime, the task becomes a question of how many you can fit through at the peak periods. The layout behind the counters and displays is designed to minimise the time of getting someone from their product choice to the till. All processes are squeezed and producing lucrative take-away coffees is no exception.
In many sandwich shops, the cappuccinos are made as and when by any member of staff. This means that they are often a place for bottlenecking. If you have to make your double espresso in to a smaller cup, then get out a take-away cup, transfer the coffee then add the milk, it causes several problems:
- With the ever increasing Health and Safety/Risk Assessment culture, transferring over 85oC liquid mid-lunchtime rush can only be a recipe for disaster
- Keeping the heat in a coffee drink is always a problem, especially since take-away cups are so prone to losing it. Extracting in to one cold cup and then pouring in to another doesn't aid the process
- Time! If you have an efficient customer turnaround time of 2 minutes and it takes (at best) another 5 or 6 seconds, that's at least 5+% less customers you can fit through the door while the lunchtime rush lasts. Over the course of a year, this missed profit would easily pay for your entire coffee machine.
It is difficult to imagine and simple to gloss over the detail, but for those yet to be convinced, the following is an extract from "Anyone Can Do It"1, written by the British founders of the giant coffee shop chain Coffee Republic:
"You might think that we at least had coffee machines. We didn't. The coffee machines were built for those squatty china cups and didn't fit our grande and tall paper cup sizes. These were too tall to fit under the espresso pourer's... ...we had to laboriously make do with a complicated system of pouring espresso into shot glasses, and only then into our own cups."
As with all of these articles, the design, build quality and ability to make a great espresso is a given. If you want more information on these areas, please follow the above links.
If you haven't already, take a look at our quick tour for a good overview of the company, the espresso machine and how we look after you. For prices and additional information about purchasing equipment, please feel free to browse our online shop. If you own a sandwich shop and have other questions and requirements that aren't addressed on this site, please get in touch, as we can almost certainly help you.
1 "Anyone Can Do It" is published by Capstone Publishing Ltd, and widely available in all good book shops.
