Seven Unusual Uses for Coffee

Ahh. A lovely cup of joe in the morning to revive your body ready for the day ahead. In my opinion, there really is nothing better than that to get your day started.
But, coffee isn’t just a wonderful stimulant – I’ve used the excess beans and grounds from our home coffee machine for a variety of things and here’s my Top 7 Unusual Uses for your Coffee!

TOP 7 UNUSUAL USES FOR COFFEE

7. GETTING RID OF ANTS

Two years ago we had an anthill pop up in our garden, threatening to destroy my lovely hard work – by simply pouring coffee grounds into the hill and in a circle around it, the ants moved on. Ants purportedly HATE black coffee!


6. REMOVING STRONG ODOURS

Ever had food go out of date while still in the refrigerator, or have a power outage and be left with odourific defrosted food in your freezer, and be left with that horrible, horrible smell that takes hours to remove? FEAR NO MORE. Simply pour used OR new ground coffee into a bowl or two and leave overnight. Coffee works as a great odour neutraliser.


5. GIVE YOURSELF A FACIAL
Instead of buying those rather expensive mud packs from the supermarket, dry out your used coffee grounds and use them as a facial cleanser; grounds are great for skin dermabrasion.


4. GIVE YOUR ASHTRAY A CLEAN

Surprisingly coffee is not a bad degreaser for those tough-to-clean items. Try using ground coffee to clean out any ashtrays or, in general, greasy surfaces – the grounds have good abrasive properties and leave behind a nice smell!


3. USE IT ON YOUR PLANTS

It’s not really a secret but ground coffee beans help enrich soil to aid in plant growth – instead of chucking those used grounds away, sprinkle them on the soil of your hydrangeas! No milk and sugar though, please!


2. AS A NATURAL HAIR COLOURANT!

Henna and black coffee work well together to cover up grey hairs, and your bonce will look a lovely Henna red! Just don’t forget to not boil the mixture! Henna and black coffee can also be combined as a safe temporary tattoo!


1. RUB THEM ON YOUR DOG!

After you give your pet a well-deserved bath, rub the grounds into his/her coat. Coffee grounds are purported to repel fleas rather effectively!


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Finding new ways to resuse coffee is a fun and green method to help our environment, can you think of any more? Post your ideas in the comment section below.

Until next time,

David Cocozza

Pepsi vs Coke - A Retailer's Perspective

Before I begin this article, I just want to make it perfectly clear I am not going to delve into the actual product differences between Pepsi and Coke (i.e. which one has more carbonated water, which one has more sugar blah blah blah) and express my personal opinion on each product, rather to introduce some concepts regarding loyalty to the brands from a retail perspective. I do however truly believe that there is huge overloyalty to Coke in our arena and this post is here to challenge it!

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It’s the age old debate: can you tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke? Certainly, there are differences between the actual products and I do believe its true that most people can taste the difference between the two; but in a retail environment, does the difference really matter? I don’t believe it does.

Consider this. You are at a local bar for the evening and decide to order a “Vodka and Coke”. The bartend replies “Will Pepsi be ok?". I am sure you would be hard pressed to find someone who decides that the establishment in question is out of line and storms out to find a bar that explicitly serves Coca Cola. In fact, 41% of the time what you are being served IS Pepsi - while just 33% is Coke*, with Coke market share predicted to decline even further in 2011 onwards.

Brand loyalty is everything in today's media dominated culture, and Coke have a loyal following like no other. Although people may ask for a "XXXXX with Coke", they are really asking for a Cola-based product, but thanks to clever marketing, people instinctively ask for Coke. The red image of Santa Claus, and indeed the American mindset of Christmas seems to be born out of the marketing of Coca Cola, psychologically associating the red drink with feelings of happiness and joy.

Seymour Valentine recently became the Southern vending parnter for Britvic soft drinks, and are heavily pushing Pepsi and Britvic products against Coke. Often, I am found that there are "Coke dominated sites" that will not accept Pepsi over Coke, simply becaue its more popular - so I undertook a sales test.

Over a 13 week period at "Coke-loyal" site, we replaced all Coke with Pepsi, and monitored the sales. We then swapped back to Coke for 13 weeks and monitored those sales. Our results? No noticeable change in revenue. With the added benefit of Pepsi Max and Diet Pepsi now introducing a 600ml bottle at the same price, in some locations I have experienced increased demands over Coke.

Pepsi is driving the growth in the Cola category, and I believe that when it boils down to a purchase from a vending machine, consumers are not completely brand loyal. If you give them the choice, they'll go for brand loyalty or the drink they have been convinced they prefer. If you just offer one brand, even if you believe it is 'inferior' to the other, I don't think you'll notice a significant loss of revenue.

So the question is, are you up to the Pespi Challenge? 

Kind Regards,

Dave

David Cocozza

* Source: Britvic Soft Drinks Indepdent Report (Data provided by CGA)

5 Myths about Coffee Beans

Despite the UK drinking a staggering estimated 70 million cups of coffee per day, I have always felt that our nation really doesn’t appreciate the wonderful bean itself and has become hooked on the “Starbucks motto” that seems to laden everything with over-roasted coffee and lots of milk.

Indeed in my industry, if I hand someone what I would call a “proper espresso”, I am often given the response that it is 'far too strong', when in fact my opposite has just been used to drinking substandard coffee since they can remember.

As my family have heralded from the darkest depths of Napoli, Italy, having a good espresso in the morning and at subsequent well-timed intervals during the rest of the day is something I have grown up with.

Today I am listing a few quick myths about coffee that seems to occur on a day to day basis for me – hopefully learning a bit more about this wonderful plant will help you appreciate good, fresh coffee even more.

So...let’s begin.

MYTH NUMBER 1  -  Freezing beans keeps them fresh

The oils in roasted coffee beans are an important part of the flavour of a good cup of Joe but contrary to popular belief, freezing actually breaks down the aromatic oils in roasted coffee.

Unfortunately, a freezer can contain many other foods which have potent odours and the porous beans can absorb the flavours. Flavoured coffees can be pleasant, but I am yet to meet anyone who wants to drink seafood or garlic flavoured coffee!!

MYTH NUMBER 2 – There are two types of bean in the world, Arabica and Robusta.

Surprisingly there are over 90 different species of the Coffea genus, but due to larger harvesting we generally only use the coffea Arabica and coffea canephora (Robusta) beans.

Recently, there was even a new species of Coffea plant was discovered in Cameroon that is naturally caffeine-free!

MYTH NUMBER 3 - Beans stay fresh for weeks

The naturally occurring oils in coffee beans oxidise very rapidly, and it does also depend on the roasting date of the bean.

The coffee I always use for my City clients is always roasted about three to four days in advance of being transported to site, so freshness is key here. Once they have left their nicely sealed bag it’s estimated they have about 1 to 2 weeks at maximum before full oxidisation occurs.

MYTH NUMBER 4 - The best coffee’s in the world comes from Italy

Actually, unless someone is growing coffee as an indoor plant, you’d be very hard pressed to find coffee that is in fact grown in Italy at all. Italy's coffee fame rests on those Italian coffee company’s abilities as roasters and blenders for espresso, not on its aptitude for growing coffee!

Perhaps more importantly for those morning-after-Thursday-night-outings...

MYTH NUMBER 5 - Coffee sobers you up!

Research on mice indicates the drink may make you feel that you are coming to your senses - but it is only an illusion. In fact, it makes it harder for people to realise they are under the influence of alcohol.

Coffee simply “wakes” you up, but has no sobering effects to it.

Best stick to the water, pal!

I have advised City businesses on sourcing sustainable and cost-effective refreshment provisions, including tea and coffee supplies, for a good number of years now. Unlike most people, I’ve had firsthand experience by working in the City all my adult life, and so I know what works and what doesn’t.

Getting the right coffee in a bluechip company is a challenging task, and I am always at hand to advise on implementing the right solution.

I hope you have enjoyed my post and gained some valueable knowledge.

Until next time,

David Cocozza

Bottled Water Coolers – A Hygiene Horror Story?

People often talk about “water cooler gossip”, an image that formed part of mainstream media culture in the late part of the 20^th Century – I have no doubt this is where bottled water coolers became popular, and as of 2011, there are estimated to be over 400,000 bottled water coolers in the UK alone using up an estimated 300 million litres of water each year.¹

A clear healthy living message for all of us from the youngest to the oldest is to drink a sufficient amount of water every day and the last 12 years have seen a significant growth and having clean drinking water, readily available in just a few metres walk, is something that we now take for granted.

On the back of this, the assumption is being made that because water is good for us, the water from water coolers is safe.

Unfortunately this may not always be the case.

Back in 2007, Consumer Focus Scotland undertook a report and published some very startling discoveries. Of a random testing of 35 samples taken from bottled water coolers for microbiological examination, a staggering 40% failed to meet standards set for water purity by the European Drinking Water Directive.²

Horrifyingly enough, one sample even gave a positive enumeration of E. faecalis. This indicates contamination from a faecal source, possibly due to cross-contamination from a user with poor personal hygiene.

Inherently, bottled water coolers are designed to be unhygienic.

Think about it.

·         A leisure centre user fills up their empty bottle using the water cooler, with the neck of the bottle touching the tap – saliva, bacteria, germs and who knows what else are coming into contact with the tap.

·         An office worker does not wash his hands after using the toilet and decides to get a drink, by touching the tap he is contaminating the cooler.

I am often asked to source and implement water solutions, and there are some fantastic alternatives to bottled water coolers on the market now. In fact, I have declared to never sell a bottled water cooler again.

For those of you that cannot currently move away from bottled coolers, general best-practice advice and something I pass onto all my clients with water coolers on premises is they should ensure that;

1. The exterior of the coolers, including the dispensing taps, are cleaned at least once a week;

2. Bottled water coolers are cleaned internally every three months;

3. POU water coolers have their filters changed every six months;

4. Water cooler users are made aware of their responsibility to use units hygienically, possibly using pictorial advice on or near the coolers themselves.

Over the next 5 years, “bag in box” and like-for-like systems will experience a huge growth in popularity. Could this decade spell the end for bottled water coolers in the UK?

For our health's sake, I sincerely hope so.

Regards,

David Cocozza

Footnotes

1 – Source: BWCA Conference 2011

2 - http://www.consumerfocus.org.uk/scotland/files/2010/10/Fountain-Failures-Report.pdf

To Infinity and Beyond

Slightly off topic and not-at-all related to refreshments and vending but I thought a worthwhile post anyway. A concept that has fascinated me and baffled me at the same time, and at this ungodly hour of 2am on a Monday morning, I have the strangest urge to try and explain it to you...

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An interesting statement was raised in the Daily Mirror a few weeks ago from a professor who stated there “could well be over 100 billion other ‘Earths’ in the universe”. I wondered, could there really be 100 billion other Earths-like planets in our universe?

As my old physics teacher would have said, and many of the world renowned professors of the World state, the universe is infinite – the basic thinking is that “infinity is something that never ends” - looking past the Occam’s Razor definition, can infinity really be clearly taught to someone else, or understood by ourselves?

Infinity is to me a very confusing concept. I just hate the word itself completely. It’s as meaningless as the word ‘nothing’... Why do I hate it? Number one, you can’t put into something measurable. Infinity is a number so big that no matter how many zeros you add onto a digit, it can never be reached; 100 billion is no closer to infinity than 100 billion billion billion (and I’m not even going to try to write that out in digits!!). If time is infinite, we are no closer to tomorrow than the end of the world as we know it.
Which brings me onto my Number Two…it’s a scary concept. How can something just go on and on and on and on and on without ever finishing….nearly everything we know of and understand today, apart from the universe, has a beginning and an end – birth and death, today and tomorrow // having no end to something seems to me, in the thoughts of my fragile little mind, a confusing and impossible concept. Where is this “infinite” space heading into? How can there be an endless expanse of emptiness that just expands into another endless expanse of emptiness?

But then, if there is an end...what is on the other side of this end, or what would this end look like? When we look at the world as we know it, when there is an end to something, something usually exists outside it – let’s take for example a human cell, so therefore cells exist within our body (a “casing”, if you will). Like this, something must exist on the other side of this end, or we’re just going back into the rant about infinity again…and in fact we go back into it even if we say there is an end to the universe, as there must also be an end to the space on the other side of our universe, to which must also have an end…and so on.

Confusing.


We’ve just started trying to understand the mysterious of the universe – what is space, what are planets made of, how did life start on our planet. I'm no scientist, but what can I say, from my heart, about what I believe in the universe?

I don’t think the matter in the universe is infinite and I don’t see how there can be enough gases and molecules in one tiny spot in space to create an infinite amount of planets. Perhaps it will only seem like an endless expanse due to amount of years there has been since the Big Bang – 13 billion apparently? So, to reach the end, we would need a machine that would travel much faster than the speed of light, and even then it would take a million generations of people to reach it, and then another million to travel back and report to the other people what they saw. By then, the light and the planets they would have seen would have travelled billions of more miles, assuming there is no end to the “nothingness” of space, and the universe would be even bigger.

BUT, I don’t think there is an end, in terms of what we know as an “end”, to the universe. I know I said I don’t grasp the concept of infinity, but hear me out on this. If there was some sort of boundary, surely the gases and whatnot would “hit” it, and stop or bounce back – we would be able to see this in billions of year’s time, or maybe even tomorrow if I’m lucky! I think that in some plausible but weird way, space is a big circle. My theory is that if we can build a machine that can travel faster than light, and live to travel billions of millions, we would actually end up right where we started,

So let me wrap up my two theories.

- Space is not exactly infinite – if you managed to travel faster than light, you would eventually end up where you was before. But because we have no machine or method to do this at the moment, it might as well be infinite.


- There is not a “boundary” to the universe – if there was a boundary, there must be something on the other side of it, and then we go back to the whole question again, because that side must either have infinite space on it to which must have a boundary etc. Space is like a big circle.
Post your theories and let’s work this out together. We can crack the mysteries of the universe…probably.

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So, next week we will be back to refreshment topics - I have an interesting article due in regarding the health risks of bottled water coolers.

Until then...

Dave

Four Top Tips for choosing the right Coffee Machine

It amazes me how many times I have visited an office where the client has asked me to review their refreshment provision, and I find a coffee machine that is completely not suited to the environment it is in. Clients need me to be the expert in the field, and for those looking to go out to market and source a number of coffee machines soon or even someone checking they made sure the right machine was chosen, here is my handy guide to help you get what you require.

TIP NUMBER ONE – KNOW YOUR STAFF COUNT

 Seems like a basic principle but can more often than not be over looked. Consider how many people will be using this machine on a daily basis, and multiply that number by three (the average number of cups of coffee per day each employee has). So, if you had 100 staff, any decent refreshment solutions provider would need to find a solution which can handle approximately 300 cups per day – whether through a combination of machines, or via one single large machine…

In situations where there are large numbers of staff (for example, 600), think about installing machines that have an external grout option. The last thing you want to happen is to install 5 brand spanking new coffee machines that are all singing and all dancing, and have to empty the internal waste container 5 times per day because the usage levels were not considered in advance!

TIP NUMBER TWO – THINK ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT

What does your company do? In a call centre environment valuable time could be wasted by employees waiting 40 seconds for a bean to cup drink, and in these situations an instant coffee machine that brews a decent white coffee in 8 seconds may be more appropriate.

Are your staff spread across a number of floors? Think about where best to place machines in order to reduce time spent travelling back and forth, multiple tea points per floor can be the best solution.

TIP NUMBER THREE – THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE

Leases on coffee machines generally run for between 3 to 5 years, so consider how the business is expected to grow over the next 3 years and what impact this would have on capital expense, need for extra machines. You can never predict exactly what will happen, but it is safe to assume that a coffee machine that is only capable of handling 150 cups per day in a 50 staff environment will lead to further machine requirements in 3 years’ time – what if you don’t have the space for more machines? As someone once told me; fail to prepare, prepare to fail!

TIP NUMBER FOUR  - WHAT DO YOU WANT THE COFFEE MACHINE TO DO?

Do you have the requirements for tea bags, or can you cut down waste by incorporating that into the machine but losing a few features? You will eliminate the waste of used tea bags.

Do you need to have a decaffeinated option, when employees have requested so? Generally, these make up about 5% of all coffee ever drunk from a machine, so does it make sense to lose another instant option e.g. hot chocolate?

Think carefully about what your employees want from a machine, and consider which of these are necessities.

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There are of course many other factors that influence the recommendation on what coffee machines are right for YOU; to go into all of them would negate the need for me to be in business (!), and ensure this post is 4,000 words long.

Choosing the right hot beverage machine can sometimes be overlooked, so think carefully when you make your next purchase!

Alternatives to Bean to Cup Coffee

In the 21^st Century, the general perception among all office staff in London is that providing drinks made from a fresh bean always give the best quality and user experience.

Whereas this was true a few years ago, for those in the know todays modern innovation has allowed hot beverage operators to provide capsule-based drinks that, mostly, beat the quality on almost any other drink whilst removing the age-old problem of “freshness”.

Let’s talk a bit about “freshness” first and coffee itself.  Coffee beans are a very powerful natural occurrence, and the generally accepted fable goes that a goatherd farmer, Kaldi, accidentally discovered them in Ethiopia in the 9^th Century, when his sheep began eating the coffee plant berries and he noticed an increase in energy; trying them for himself resulted in no luck, and so he threw the berries on his fire, from which a very enticing aroma which we all know and love billowed. The roasted beans were raked out of the fire, ground up and dissolved in water. Welcome to the world’s first Black Coffee.

Coffee is a very volatile substance, full of natural oils. When exposed to heat, sunlight or oxygen, the beans begin to “dry”; essentially the fatty oils that are contained begin to evaporate. This oil is what gives coffee it’s “crème” on an espresso, and is the foremost source of flavour from the coffee itself.

Once exposed to one of the three elements, coffee beans have somewhere from between a few days and a few weeks, depending upon the time left before delivery to the customer, before they “lose” their taste, and end up producing a flavourless, dry, horrible creation; a problem that plagues low use environments where the client is still looking for a quality solution.

Capsule systems have long been regarded as a middle-market solution, providing a costly but widely hassle-free coffee that gives an “acceptable” taste.

Not anymore says I. Welcome to the 21^st Century.

For those looking at a still relatively inexpensive but restaurant-quality solution, Lavazza BLUE (Best Lavazza Ultimate Espresso) provides a market leading espresso and black coffee. Couple it with a pure semi-skimmed milk powder and serve in a china cup, you’ll get an espresso or cappuccino that can rival many of the UKs coffee shops.

Unlike beans, a capsule is not exposed to light, oxygen or (more often than not) heat and so have a shelf life of up to 12 months from date of manufacture. You could, in theory, not touch a capsule machine for a year and it would still produce the same quality of espresso as it would have done the day it was loaded.

Keurig, a zero to $3 billion company in 5 years, I am predicting will be entering the UK market within a few years. With over 300 different products, and a simple, clean machine, I am predicting a real breakthrough revolution in this market.

Let this serve as an ultimatum to Flavia and Mars Drinks in general. Believe me; your time is well and truly UP.