I don't need to tell you that 2020
has been a crazy year for the coffee
industry, but as things start to recover,
it's time to take stock and understand
where the industry is going in the next
five years. In this video,
I'll take you through the top three key
trends to look out for if you're to be
sustainable in the near
future. Right after this.
Hi,
it's Adam Carr here from the
Coffee Science and Education
Center at Seven Miles
Coffee Roasters.
We started this report about a year ago
and the idea or the main aim of this
report was to really capture what
the next five years might look like.
So we will know what kind of machines
that we should be buying to put into cafes
and restaurants, our own cafe for
example. How we should be roasting coffee,
what people wanted in a
roast inside their coffee,
and many other things of that nature.
Now obviously in the meantime,
COVID-19 has come through a pandemic and
that's caused a delay in many ways in
the report. We were literally
about to release the report,
the beginning of the pandemic, but
now that we're coming through it,
I wont say we're on the
other side of it yet.
We've determined that actually a lot
of the things inside this report are
talking about implementing change and
there's never been a better time to
implement change in an
environment such as this.
So from the research we found that there
are three key trends that are going to
influence cafes or coffee shop
sustainability in the immediate future,
moving towards 2025.
The first is automation,
the second is craft and cuisine,
and the third is fast and slow coffee.
So let's talk about automation first.
Automation refers to quite literally
anything that happens in a cafe or
restaurant that could be done by machine.
Now for a long time at Seven Miles,
we've believed that the future of coffee
is going to be baristas that know more
about their craft and have a higher
degree of interaction with the customer.
In other words,
it's going to become more of a hospitality
focused role than a machine jockey
type role.
And we're already seeing this happening
with the technologies within the last
five years. So for example, the
Puqpress is a great example,
or the Ubermilk - automated compression
of coffee grounds into a Portafilter or
automatic generation of steamed
milk. We think in the near future,
a lot of people are gonna be implementing
machines that combine all of these
things into one. We already have two
or three machines in the industry. Uh,
they've been brought out in the last
two years even, uh, that can do this.
And a couple of great examples of the
Eversys Cameo and the Scanomat Topbrewer.
Is this the kind of technology that's
going to be in cafes and restaurants
across the next five years? We
actually think the answer is yes.
That is either as their primary serving
technology or the primary machine that
they use to serve coffee or as a
secondary machine to serve fast coffee,
which has obviously the third
term we've talked about.
So I suppose one of the questions
here is why now for automation,
if some of these
technologies exist already,
why aren't they selling like hotcakes?
Why aren't they everywhere? Well,
I think there are a couple
of reasons for this,
but I think there is one really big
driver as to why we think this is going to
take off in the next five years and
that has largely do with the fact that
cafes and restaurants are finding it more
and more difficult to retain staff in
their cafe.
We found that for over 45% of respondents
in a fairly large scale survey that we
did, one of the biggest
fears and insecurities that
cafe owners have in their
businesses is retaining and
training new staff. Most baristas,
by the time they're really, really
good tend to move on. In other words,
introducing automated systems means you
can get coffee of a consistently good
quality regardless of the person that
you actually have behind the machine.
Now that doesn't mean the person behind
the machine isn't still important.
The barista arguably will become even
more important in the future and not just
in a way of tasting coffee to make sure
it's tasting the way that it should be
and to make changes on the machine,
but also to be able to communicate tastes
and craft to the person that's coming
in to buy the coffee. Relationship with
customers has never been more important.
One of the things we've identified in the
last five years is that we've actually
reached peak coffee in Australia.
So the per capita growth of kilos
of coffee consumed per year,
it's quite literally flatlined.
And in fact for the last two years it's
completely flat-lined or even gone down.
And yet,
we've seen an increase in the revenue
brought in by the cafe cafe and
coffee shop industry. So what
does this mean? Where is that,
where is that revenue coming from? Well,
it's food and for a number of years,
most savvy operators have understood
this and they've increased and
bolstered their food offerings to run
a more successful business or a more
sustainable business.
So that's why we think craft and cuisine
are especially important across the
next five years. So with the
increasing focus on food,
one might start naturally thinking
about how to increase their service
offerings.
So a business model that
might traditionally have
been a breakfast and lunch
service entering into an evening
service. So you might do breakfast,
lunches and dinner, and
then you start to think,
well maybe this is both a coffee
and a food service running all day.
Maybe we're now a restaurant, not a cafe.
So I think in the future we're going to
start to see a sort of blurring of the
lines, if you will, between
cafes and restaurants.
Not sure the names will
necessarily change,
but effectively the function
will be very, very similar.
So the third thing here is fast and slow
coffee or even fast versus slow coffee.
So let's qualify what
we mean by those things.
So fast coffee refers to a person
literally grabbing and going.
The 7-11 one dollar coffee
model is a good example of this.
But there are other ways
that it can be utilized.
Slow coffee refers to quite literally
the sit down experience. You know,
we want to be cocooned
from the outside world.
We're going to sit down and relax. We
want to enjoy we want to socialize.
It's kind of the traditional
coffee shop coffee house.
It's existed for many years. It's
a fantastic place to hang out.
So fast or slow coffee,
fast and slow coffee.
What should I be doing in my business?
Well, I guess the answer is it depends,
but for sure you need you to be doing
one or the other or both very, very well.
You cannot be stuck in the middle
somewhere and keep it nebulous that you do
sort of a slow, you know,
you do a fast-ish coffee and
it's an okay place to hang.
We suspect you may be in
a bit of danger there,
but you can if your space facilitates
it and your market clearly seems like...
There is many places where this
could happen, you could do both.
So you could have a lightning fast
espresso window and an amazing customer
experience that has great couches and
places where people can hang and can
connect. It has an exceptional food
offering. You can definitely do both.
There is great potential
to be able to do that.
And I think actually some of the
better cafes probably will do both.
So that's a taste of what we found in
cafe 2025 but we'd be very interested to
hear what you think is going to be a big
trend in the next five years and what
you think is going to happen and what
cafes and restaurants and coffee shops
might look like in the near future.
I'm Adam Carr from the Coffee Science
and Education Center here at Seven Miles.
Have a good one.
