It’s true…

I’ve seen it happen to very well established businesses that love their coffee and love to serve high quality coffees but hate doing the important stuff like cleaning up

Coffee machines aren’t cheap and they normally require quite a hefty investment both in time and money because they aren’t easy to operate without the right kind of training either (check out our other post on training here).

So how do businesses lose that amount of money in just 24 hours…

Well actually it probably takes a little while longer than 24 hours but once you’ve made this crucial mistake there is no going back and it’s time to throw out the old machine or spend just as much as a new on getting it repaired.

Most businesses that serve coffee use a traditional espresso machine as part of their coffee offering if not exclusively for their coffee production. So you probably use a steam wand several times a day and we hope that you’ve been advised to ‘purge’ it and to clean it as you go.

Some people think that this is for just for quality because lets face it who wants a coffee with milk that has been scorched on to the steam wand mixed in with your latte, cappuccino or flat white? Not me that’s for sure!

The common misunderstanding that this isn’t just for quality it’s also for maintenance as well.

You see the steam wand is a very clever piece of kit and not many know that it has a natural vacuum due to the mechanics of the wand. That means that while it’s not in use it is very very gently pulling in anything that might on it, so if you leave milk on the tip then when that milk dries and goes solid it could start to pull very minute particles of milk into the machine.

YES…INTO THE MACHINE!!!

That dried milk can then go into the boiler, into the internal parts and beyond. It can quite literally blow up the inside of your coffee machine.

That £3000-£6000 you just spent on a machine could be dead and gone just because one of your staff was feeling a bit lazy on the day, or was rushed for time at the end of a shift and thought “that’s ok I can leave that for the morning”.

Or…

What we see happen a lot is that when we’ve delivered our initial training the business brings in new members of staff and they don’t get inducted properly and maybe they even have bad habits from a previous company.

They go to clean the machine but they simply don’t know what they are doing!

Cleaning Checklist Blog Advert

We understand that coffee is important to a business, though it may not be at the top of the things to look out for because lets face it – how many things are you worrying about right now?

Training and cleanliness are some of the most important things in your business in every other area so please don’t let your standards slip on the coffee machine…it could cost you dearly!