Whether you are roasting a favorite flavor of decaf or serving an artistically designed latte, the tools and products you use within your business can make a difference in both the quality and presentation of your product. If you are looking to supplement your store’s serving products or are simply trying to find products that will make your business run more smoothly, there is a plethora of innovative products and services to help.
1st Pay POS
1stPayPOS has launched a free loyalty and rewards program to promote customer acquisition and retention. The program is merchant configurable, allowing the consumer to earn either visits or points, plus a birthday reward. The rewards may be a free item or a dollar discount towards their next purchase. The program can be operated digitally or with a card, and when a consumer registers their credit card or gift card with the program, they automatically earn their rewards when they pay with a registered card.
The coffee retailer now has a free loyalty and rewards program, which can be combined with the 1stPayPOS gift card program to create a stored value loyalty and rewards program. This innovation can reduce merchant account fees where the customer must put funds on their loyalty card to earn their rewards. The stored value program also increases customer acquisition and retention with the ability to convert a gift card into a loyalty and rewards card.
Gift Card Ape
Gift Card Ape has created an system that allows you to create a Gift Card for your business right from your iPad or iPhone. They can service any size coffee shop, from your locally-owned single location to the largest of franchises and chains. After downloading the free app from Apple’s app store, you simply sign up on Gift Card Ape’s website giftcardape.com to receive a card reader and your gift cards. When you create a gift Card in their system you can also capture the customer’s email and use it for future marketing. As more and more coffee shops are using Square as their credit card processor, Gift Card Ape will work right along side Square or whatever mobile merchant processor your company has chosen. They have no transaction fees, no contracts, and no commitment to a merchant service provider. Gift Card Ape is a stand-alone option for your iDevice , allowing you to no longer invest in an expensive POS system or be tied to merchant processor.
Bloomfield
Bloomfield offers a full line of coffee warmers, grinders and glass decanters. Their innovative Koffee King Three Warmer Stepped Right, Pour-Over Lo-Profile Coffee Brewer features a one-piece drawn stainless steel water tank with superior design for extended life. The brewer’s porcelain enameled warmer plates position decanters securely and, with no exposed screwheads, will not scratch or scrape decanters. The Lo-Profile brewing system is designed to take advantage of the finest electrical components and has the lowest service cost in the industry for this type of brewer. From the patented
water delivery system to the exclusive Ready-to-Brew light, the Lo-Profile system makes brewing effortless. All this comes in a compact size, just under 17″.
The interchangeability of parts with other Bloomfield models will significantly reduce the inventory of spare parts required to service many body styles.
Garden to Cup Organics
Garden to Cup Organics is a wholesaler of award winning, ethically sourced, organic loose-leaf teas and herbal blends. Their teas are sourced directly from carefully selected tea gardens around the world, and hand-blended in microbatches to produce the highest quality products for your business. They establish and foster strong partnerships with their suppliers, thus maintaining a sustainable and scalable supply chain.
Garden to Cup Organics offers a number of business solutions, well suited to meet a wide variety of needs. These include wholesale of their established tea and herbal blend varieties, custom blend development and ongoing supply, complete custom brand and product line development, and private and white label programs.
Handy Brew
For small-scale coffee brewing technology, Handy Brew with Double Screened Filters Method is the latest invention for coffee makers. Although Handy Brew is very similar to French Press style coffee brewing, it enhances the concept and helps eliminate the sediment that French Press methodology often produces.
Handy Brew follows the Direct Immersion Brewing Method and produces a cup of rich coffee. One Handy Brew can make hot brew coffee, cold brew coffee, and cold brew coffee concentrate.
Mother Parker’s Tea & Coffee
RealCup, an independent, single serve beverage brand launched by Mother Parker’s Tea & Coffee, revolutionizes single serve beverage with the launch of EcoCup, a new recyclable capsule that’s compatible with all K-cup brewers. EcoCup capsules are currently available for premium loose-leaf tea brands, including Higgins & Burke. EcoCup for single-serve coffee brands, including Marley Coffee, will be available in 2015. To recycle the EcoCup capsule, consumers simply pull off the top with an easy-to-use tab, recycle the cup and dispose of the tea and the filter. The EcoCup capsule is BPA-free and accepted in many curbside recycling programs across the country.
Perka
Loyality programs have quickly become vital components of a coffee shop’s business. Perka is a loyalty rewards program that seeks to make rewards programs easy and fun for the retailer and consumer alike by tailoring loyalty programs that encourage repeat visits and improve sales. Merchants can include rewards for multiple products or services at once. Unlike many of its competitors, when a Perka customer checks in, the shop is notified. Loyalty rewards are granted only after a purchase is validated. Overall, Perka
enables small businesses across all sectors to roll out sophisticated and multifaceted loyalty efforts on par with airline and credit card rewards programs.
uVu Lids
Retailers who use safer, better lids are telling their customers that they care about their safety, their clothing, and the environmental impact coffee lids can have. uVu Lids offer a patented design and are engineered to be the safest and fastest lids on the market. Here’s why: uVu lids offer a deep reservoir and overall better design for a better drinking experience. Each lid also grips from the inside out, preventing spills and accidents. This also helps prevent lids from popping off when you squeeze the cup. Also, four slots in the top of the rim provide fast confirmation that the lid is on securely all the way around; no need to double or triple check that lids are on safely. This speeds up service while at the same time preventing drips, spills and dangerous accidents.
Weldon Flavorings
Weldon Flavorings’ most innovative product is their unsweetened Coffee Flavorings, a sensible way to serve delicious flavored coffee any place and any time.
These pure liquid flavorings are completely free of sugar, artificial sweeteners, creamers, powders, and syrups. Because their flavorings are not pre-sweetened, coffee consumers can enjoy flavored coffee, cappuccinos, and lattes unsweetened or sweetened with their sweetener of choice. Their One-Cup-At-A-Time flavored coffee concept allows every customer to choose from a variety of flavors without a lot of extra expense, added calories or sweetness in their coffee. Best of all, purchase of additional equipment is not necessary. Weldon Flavorings pre-measured pump bottles allow for quick and accurate flavoring of every cup.
Wilbur Curtis
Give your coffee program a caffeine boost with the innovative Curtis G4 Digital Gemini® Brewing System. The secret to Gemini’s performance is smart IntelliFresh (IF) technology. Putting brains behind the brew, the Wilbur Curtis Company developed IF as part of their quest to simplify brewing and serving high volumes of fresh coffee at the perfect temperature.
IntelliFresh maintains coffee’s ideal freshness and temperature throughout the dispensing cycle by enveloping the satellite servers with pulses of gentle heat. These pulses keep the coffee at a consistent temperature while maintaining the chemical structure of the coffee. The result? The coffee taste is not altered and each and every cup is as hot as the one before it. IF technology keeps the coffee at the optimal temperature for the duration of the pre-set serving time, ensuring consistent coffee quality.
Curtis recently introduced the new Thermal FreshTrac System. Activated from the moment coffee is brewed, it provides a simple visual system that communicates time and volume at a glance that’s easy to see, even from across the room. The moment coffee starts flowing into the dispenser, sensors in the lid activate the system and volume is measured. Liquid level bars eliminate the need to guess the amount of coffee in the dispenser. An LCD timer immediately begins to count UP or DOWN to show operations when it’s time to brew again. Plus, an active LED light display allows servers to track coffee freshness and volume anytime at a glance.
Roasters
Ahh, the perfect roast. The artfully scientific nature of coffee roasting brings consistent challenges to roasting professionals. Equipment enhancements, technology improvements, and new, top-of-mind issues keep coffee roasters on their toes and keep industry partners eager to find ways to enhance the roasting segment of the specialty coffee business.
Buhler
Buhler has recently introduced the new InfinityRoast coffee Roaster, a new dimension in coffee flavor creation. The InfinityRoast represents the next-generation coffee roaster that is leading the way into the future of roasting. The roaster has the widest process flexibility with variable air-to-bean ratio in creating traditional and innovative non-traditional roasting profiles. The InfinityRoast line empowers customers to adjust the time-temperature pathway so that they can achieve their desired quality—batch by batch.
What’s more, the sophisticated technology of the InfinityRoast inspires coffee innovations and assists in creating new roasting profiles for customized flavor characteristics and physical bean properties. The InfinityRoast is designed for high-performance operations and sets superior standards when it comes to safety, reliability, energy efficiency and minimal environmental impact. The cutting edge automation makes for very user-friendly operation and recipe management.
Cascade Coffee
Cascade Coffee offers packaging, roasting, and grinding operations. The company’s 17 distinctive packaging lines provide a wide range of sizes and are ideal for retail, club, bulk, institutional, food service and large bulk roasting operations. In addition, Cascasde Coffee’s custom roasting segment offers a dedicated batching system featuring four Probat Burns Roasters, a Probat R1500, a Probat R2000, and offers bulk roasting capabilities. They also provide continuous product evaluation, including color analysis, grind analysis, laser and sieves, HPLC caffeine analysis, product packaging leak detection, and moisture analysis for green and roasted coffee, through expert cupping and monitoring equipment in their well-appointed quality laboratory.
Diedrich Manufacturing
Diedrich Manufacturing’s IR Series offers a wealth of innovative features that any roaster would love. In fact, before the Diedrich Roaster, coffee was almost entirely roasted in fluid-bed or drum roasters utilizing atmospheric/blue flame burners. Not only did this practice create a vast amount of noxious gasses, but it facilitated a crude production process. Using this process the operator had very little capability to manipulate the complex chemistry of coffee throughout the roast process.
Diedrich Manufacturing has employed a proprietary roasting technology that utilizes ceramic infrared burners and heat exchangers to not only dramatically reduce noxious gas emissions and provide for a cleaner roasting medium, but also to make possible entirely new vistas of roasting capabilities. Diedrich’s roasting technology allows for the precise control of the roasting process from start to finish. Simply put, with a Diedrich roaster, not only are your operations cleaner, but you can create roast profiles unimaginable using other machines.
Flexicon
Looking to streamline your production processes? Flexicon has introduced an all-new Flexi-Disc line of Tubular Cable Conveyors for the gentle transfer of coffee and tea products. A strategic addition that complements Flexicon’s established line of flexible screw conveyors and pneumatic conveying systems, this new tubular cable conveyor allow users to convey virtually any bulk solid material efficiently.
The conveyor moves material using high-strength polymer discs––affixed to a stainless steel or galvanized cable––that slide within smooth stainless steel tubing, moving fragile coffee and tea products gently, quietly and dust-free, horizontally, vertically or at any angle, through small holes in walls or ceilings. The system can have single or multiple inlets and outlets, and convey over short distances or hundreds of feet/meters.
Available in unlimited configurations, the conveyor is offered as a stand-alone system, or fully integrated with upstream and downstream equipment.
Fres-co System
Effectively packaging your roasted coffee to keep it fresh is essential. Fres-co offers stock bags with the authentic one-way degassing valve that keeps your coffee fresh to the last cup. Whether it is coffee or tea, Fres-co’s multi-ply barrier laminates are proven to preserve the quality and freshness of your product.
Fres-co stock bags are available in sizes from 2 oz to 40 lbs. and Fres-co’s Corner Seal technology allows sealing the bag on four corners (side seal) removing the back seam, which achieves four solid graphic panels for better shelf impact.
Fres-co’s Gusseted Bags are designed to hold from 2 oz to more than 50 lbs of product. They are available in a standard design with a center back seam, or with the Fres-co Corner Seal technology for more commanding shelf presence.
Texpak/Scolari Engineering
Texpak, Inc. was founded in 1934 and is the originator of the plastic and aluminum clips used in the packaging of apparel. For almost 80 years their product line has expanded and they are now one of the worlds leading suppliers of product identification and packaging specialties to manufacturers.
Texpak supplies coffee roasters and other manufacturers with easy-to-use software for producing bar-coded labels and hang tags on personal computers in your office or factory. Their new laser systems are ideal for large or small volume users. They also offer a broad line of stock tags and labels and produce high-quality custom tags and labels to meet your specific requirements. Texpak is also a major supplier of packaging specialties and they carry a large selection of tag attaching guns, and needles and fasteners