Café Dispatch #28 : The First Five Minutes Matter
Why almost nobody checks on your table, what India taught me about it, and my last week at Perfect Daily Grind.
Welcome to the Café Dispatch, a weekly letter about interesting café trends across the globe. If you enjoy it, please feel free to share it ☕️
This week is my LAST week consulting for Perfect Daily Grind. I took this opportunity earlier this year when I was given the chance to join the team and help them with their sales and go to market strategy and it’s been honestly the best and most strategic choice I have made a in a long time.
Before that, I used to pick jobs that were handed to me by people who believed I had enormous potential and could do incredible and yet, though I may have done fairly well, my heart was rarely in it. I always had mini side-hustles to stay excited about work life but I rarely fully committed to it.
Working with the biggest media in the coffee industry taught me a lot but mostly it offered me conviction, and confirmed that I pivoted to an industry I loved where people saw my true colours and my passion which led to so many more exciting opportunities in just the past 2 months.
It comes a time where you need to jump ships and trust yourself a little more than you would. Where the opportunities coming your way are too good to pass because they tick all the boxes. So here I am - feeling extremely grateful for understanding how the largest media in the world functions while contributing to their success, and now flying out to build my own media dream and journey.
If you’re a coffee company or a café, and are curious to hear more about how we could work together, or know someone who I should absolutely meet to chat about coffee and cafés, please don’t be shy and DM me ☕️
This week’s Café Dispatch includes: how expectations changed our relationships with cafés, a french café in Buenos Aires and why we all love Cold Brew
Very few of us speak about expectations when it comes to our relationships with cafés, mostly because (IMO) there are never really positive. At the same time, I also think that this is how the industry keeps improving.
Understanding what your customers expect from your café is a great way to keep doing better and coming up with great ideas. It might be my years in the tech industry trying to figure out how to design surveys that bring in great feedback but I’m convinced that this applies to cafés too - and medias!
One way to see whether feedback is really important to a place is by observing whether waiters - baristas or chefs walk to your table within the first 5 minutes of you digging into your drink & food. And I’ve found that this is still a very RARE occurence across all kind of establishments. If it were more common, cafés would have the chance to fix anything gone wrong, potentially upsell or cross-sell (always with kindness and with a mindset of adding value to their experience).
India, surprisingly, showed me that this was a part of their ways of working. It’s most likely because they have an insane amount of staff in each location due to how big their workforce is in general, but still… if they couldn’t, some of the locations, such as Conçu in Hyderabad, brought me the bill with this very cute form.
Those are tiny, incremental changes that often make a big difference. Also it shows that you truly care about anyone walking in the door.
On a fun note, here are my expectations when I walk into a new place.
Being greeted when walking in
Friendly staff
Being told about the coffee and food in detail
Being served fairly rapidly
Being check on when having my first bite or sip
Good music playing
Decent seating depending on the kind of place I visit
And then, I have an array of more specific expectations… but I won’t go on about it over here because gosh, I’ll just scare you.
But I want to know yours!
As I am planning my next few trips abroad, hopefully to go meet more café owners who are looking to work on their positioning - branding in order to scale their brand globally, I came across Moshu Treehouse.
The facade was completely revamped on this gorgeous yet ruined french influenced building. And as you can see they designed the bar inside while keeping some of that luxurious feel beautiful mansions used to have. They’re also serving specialty coffee from Colombia which looks to be approved by a lot of coffee nerds.
Gen Z Experiential Retail: How Coach and Ralph Lauren Use In-Store Cafés to Win Younger Shoppers - an interesting way to present this surge of cafés inside fashion stores though I do think that this is only the start. As brands pop up and want to create worlds, anyone could identify with, we’ll see more and more activations and cafés across retail stores.
Dunkin’ coffee buckets are coming back with new car cup holder - no comments though this really signals how fast food chains are innovating in coffee to charge more and attract a bigger market share.
‘Cold Brew’ Is Now in the Dictionary. What Does That Say About Contemporary Coffee Culture? - interesting piece about how words are going into dictionaries but also, how cold brew came to be. It’s a little (WAY) older than what we think!
If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,
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When I go to a new place, and I'll focus on when I'm traveling, most of the excitement for me is that I get to go into a new place, in a new city or country. I definitely want the coffee and what every type of pastry I have, and you know I will have a pastry, to be good. I'm like in a little wonderland, taking in the interior and vibes, while I drink coffee. I think it goes with out saying for me that whatever type of business I go to and want the staff to be friendly. Some places, of course are better than others, but I really only had one negative experience, in the past 5 years, where the experience was bad because both the coffee and muffin were not good as well as any vibe.