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More than a place that serves coffee, a coffee shop should feel like a temporary retreat where individuals can escape from the rigors of normal life. If your coffee shop is dirty, though, that feeling of tranquility will be ruined. At the same time, keeping your coffee shop clean can be a job that demands a lot of your time and energy. With the right renovations, though, you'll be able to clean up messes that occur and keep your coffee shop cleaner on a day-to-day basis.

Remove Carpet

If you're moving into a space that was previously used for a different purpose, one of the first things you'll want to do is remove any and all carpet. Carpet is difficult to clean when coffee gets spilled and holds onto dirt as customers move into and out of your coffee shop. You can replace the carpet with an easy-to-clean surface such as laminate or concrete. Hard floors are easy to apply waterproofing to and can be installed as waterproof by professionals.

Waterproof Porous Surfaces

In some cases, you may want to leave porous surfaces, such as wood finishes and leather cushions, in your coffee shop to add a more relaxed feel. However, any porous surfaces can make it difficult to keep your coffee shop clean when they absorb spills. That's why you should think about waterproofing these surfaces so that you can maintain their appearance and ensure that they're easy to keep clean at all times.

Simplify with Stainless

There's a reason that you see so much stainless steel in commercial kitchens: it's easy to clean. It makes sense, then, to use as much stainless steel as possible in your coffee shop to help simplify your cleaning processes. Stainless steel can be used in food preparation areas, service counters, on walls, on table tops, and much more. In addition to being easy to clean, stainless steel has the added benefit of being easy to sanitize.

Add Indoor Spigot

If you have a floor or other interior surfaces that are waterproof, it makes sense to clean them in the easiest way possible: by using a hose. By installing an indoor spigot, you can add easy access to water so that you can wash your floors, fill up buckets, and do other water-related tasks with ease. Just be sure that your furnishings are protected from water so that you don't end up causing damage.

Among other benefits you'll receive from making renovations to your coffee shop is the ability to clean your coffee shop with fewer chemicals. Since you'll have plenty of easy-to-clean surfaces, a simple bucket of soapy water will often suffice to get the job done. This will leave your coffee shop smelling clean without the overpowering scent that cleaning chemicals often have. This will ensure that the most important smell in your coffee shop - the coffee - will always take center stage.

People love going out to cafes to share a cup of coffee or a sandwich with friends and family. For many consumers, dining out is their entertainment for the week. As such, it’s important that cafe owners and staff make guests feel welcome. Here are four tips that will help them do that.

Acknowledge Them When They Come In

No one likes to go into a restaurant to eat and feel like they are invisible to the staff. Hosts, waitstaff and other front-of-the-house workers should acknowledge new guests when they come in. If the server who will wait on them can’t get to them right away, he or she should at least say hello. Even taking a drink order can go a long way toward making guests feel like they’re not being ignored.

Get the Whole Staff Involved

In recent years, team service has become more popular. Team service is where everyone in the restaurant takes care of guests. This might mean a server may run another server’s food out to a table or a bartender may deliver a drink to guests in the dining room. A manager or a busser may box up food for a table. This ensures prompt service and makes guests feel at home.

Train Your Staff Well

When you don’t properly train your staff, you’re asking them to give poor customer service. What may be obvious to you is not obvious to them. For example, you know it’s best to pick up dirty dishes as you walk by a table. An untrained person may not know this. Don’t expect them to. If you can train in-house, do so. If not, there are plenty of online restaurant training resources that will help you get your staff up to speed on topics, like upselling, listening and dining room awareness.

Avoid Overbooking

It’s also very important to avoid overbooking. Few things will irritate customers more than having to wait 30 or 40 minutes past their reservation time. However, as a small café that may or may not even take reservations, this means that it’s hard to anticipate when the influx of customers will come. However, whenever you know that you’re reserving lots of space for a party, call in the cavalry of your staff to make sure that you don’t become understaffed for the rest of the café that’s open.

No restaurant guest wants to feel ignored and unwelcome. However, this can happen if a cafe’s staff isn’t well-trained or if the restaurant gets overbooked. Good service requires dedication and teamwork. If you follow the tips listed in this post, you’ll go a long way towards ensuring that your guests feel taken care of.

One of the keys to growing a restaurant business is to make your restaurant stand out. Technology is one of the things that you can use to separate your business from the competitors, and many technological upgrades are necessary just to remain on the same playing field. There are several types of technology that you can add to your restaurant. Here are a few of the more common ones that customers may begin to expect.

Digital POS System

It is estimated that 80 percent of restaurants today have an electronic register system. However, you can use a digital POS system that is even more sophisticated, allowing the customers to make their own orders without the aid of a cashier. While this may not be the best system for every restaurant, it is extremely useful for fast-food restaurants where the majority of orders are the same and require few customizations. As more fast-food chains adopt this new technology, those who fail to upgrade with the times may seem outdated to customers.

Digital Signs

Digital signs have become commonplace in most restaurants in today’s modern world to the point that even many sit-down restaurants are getting them. Digital displays of your menu allow customers to get a view of what you offer without having to commit to sitting down straight off, which is appealing to newer customers unfamiliar with your establishment. Having your own screens in the restaurant also can become an added stream of revenue if you’re willing to sell some advertising space among the slides of your own making. Additionally, you can let the customers know about the loyalty programs and discounts that are available. Today’s commercial TFT LCD displays manufacturing offers a variety of sizes and screen types that can easily be adapted to your restaurant type.

Protected Wi-Fi

While just about any restaurant can offer Wi-Fi at their establishment, many are failing to properly protect their Wi-Fi signals from just anyone getting on and accessing the restaurant’s network. This not only gives them access to the data and devices of other customers, but it can put the restaurant’s private data and devices at risk of hacking as well. If you aren’t interested in making Wi-Fi a major offer for your customers, then make sure to encrypt the Wi-Fi network that your restaurant uses for business separately from those of the customers. If you wish to offer your customers a secure line to access Wi-Fi themselves, then you can offer then encrypted, limited access on a separate customer network line.

The right technology will help enhance your business. It can also help keep customers coming back to your business. You can invest in a digital POS system and digital signs. You may also want to purchase Bluetooth Temperature Sensors. Additionally, it is a good idea to have Wi-Fi in your restaurant.

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe

Last night, a perfect New England summer night, I was talking about cafe and restaurant management with an old friend, a former executive chef (like me), restaurant owner and major lines food salesman. The topic of passion was how old-school successful operators calculate the hourly success of their business.

One of the tricks old-school operators use is knowing exactly how much money each item sold puts to their bottom line. A good operator can stand in the middle of the shop and point at each item sold and tell you:

That turkey panini puts $3 to my bottom line. That frappe makes me $2 every time one is sold. Thatapple fritter drops a buck in my pocket every time we sell one.

Now they aren’t telling you how much each item sells for; they’re telling you how much profit each item makes.

How many operators today, or, cafe managers, can tell you how much a sale of every item in an hour puts to profit?

How do you calculate this? In future blogposts, I’ll cover calculating food or beverage cost, calculating labor cost, and calculating operating expense and how to calculate each of these factors on a per item level. Basically, it works like this (example):

Item Sell Price – Ingredient Cost – Labor Cost – Operating Expense = Profit, or, “What Goes In Your Pocket”

By the way, neither of us ever shied away from revealing this information to our staffs. In fact, we often shared this information, as doing so 1. taught staff valuable skill toward becoming a more valuable employee and 2. motivated them to upsell customers to more profitable items.

Have you calculated the profit you make from the sale of each item you offer? We’d love to hear your opinion and methods of tracking cafe performance.

Jeff from Mocafe