One of my favorite drinks can be found in Portland, Oregon at a long-lasting bar called Paddy’s. Paddy’s is a gorgeous older bar, with a back bar nearly forty feet wide and sixteen feet tall, replete with two of those rolling library ladders for the bartenders to get to the ultra-premium top shelf. This bar, on St. Patrick’s Day, is jammed beyond belief. The drink there I like is their version of a Spanish Coffee. It’s a showy exhibitionistpreparation, with flaming alcohol, rum and whipped cream.

There’s some argument in Portland that this drink has it’s roots at a venerable local restaurant,Huber’s. Here’s a video I found on Youtube of them making it at Huber’s.

Last night I decided to try remixing this recipe with Mocafe Azteca D’oro 1519 Spiced Ground Chocolate. Oh my lord. It was one of those clear chilly New England summer nights and this drink was a hit with my friends. Simply substitute the coffee in the drink with Mocafe Spiced Ground Chocolate hot chocolate.

If you entertain a lot at home, this drink is sure to be a crowd pleaser at your next party. By the way, I stood in for my Dad years ago, giving my sister away in marriage to one of those Paddy’s Bar ladder-jockey bartenders, in the back dining room. Talk about an Irish wedding!

Jeff from Mocafe

Solutions for Operators

A standard practice in the restaurant industry is to calculate the food cost of every item you sell. Knowing this cost allows you to a) purchase ingredients more wisely and b) maintain and train staff to standards. There is a time investment in making these calculations, but the reward is a "tighter ship", leading to greater profit opportunity and lessening of production costs.

So how do you calculate the production cost of your menu items? If you ballpark it in your head, it's likely to not be accurate. Let's get started in a demonstration. First, download the sample Food Cost Worksheet. Then you'll need tools to measure: a scale and volume measuring (cup/teaspoon) tools are necessary.

Click this link to open a Food Cost Worksheet Template you can download for your use.

Please notice there are formulas in some of the cells. Be careful to not edit those cells.

Let's fill this worksheet out for a bagel with plain cream cheese. The first thing to do is enter the date and the recipe name: "Bagel with Cream Cheese". We're not going to enter anything in the cells named "RecipeMultiplied" nor "Size" - we don't need these for this sample.

Next, let's enter the sell price for this item. I randomly chose $2.95. We don't need to enter anything in either of these two cells (there are auto-formulas in them): "Cost Per Portion" and "Cost %".

Now let's enter our ingredients. We type in Bagel (be as specific as you want - this is a text cell). Moving right, we enter the number 1 in the "Count" column. Moving right again, we enter the cost of that one bagel in the "AP$/unit" cell. Let's pause so I can explain these column heading in both the measures section and the costing section.

In the measures section, we have three columns marked "Weight", "Volume" and "Count". If the ingredient is measured by weight, enter it in that column (this is when you need a scale). If measured by volume, enter the volume amount in that column. The same goes for count.

In the costing section, we have the column marked "AP$/unit". "AP$/unit" stands for Price of Ingredient As Purchased, per unit of measure. In this example, the cost of one plain bagel is $0.75 each.

The right-most column is the subtotal for this ingredient. You'll need to enter a formula in here. The formula for the bagel in this example looks like this:

=sum(E10*F10)

E10 is the cell that contains the count of the ingredient. F10 is the ingredient cost. The multiply function is the star character *

Writing the formula in this column is pretty easy. You only need to choose which cell from the measure of the ingredient you want in the formula. It is going to be in either the Weight, Volume of Count cell of that row. Let's look at the next ingredient to demonstrate what I mean by this.

The next row down has the cream cheese ingredient. I've put in one ounce by weight and entered the cost per that weight measure (ounces). The formula I write in the subtotal column looks like this:

=sum(C11*F11)

Pretty simple, really. In the old days, they'd do this with a calculator and note paper. Once you get comfortable entering the subtotal formulas, it goes pretty quick. By the way, if you have multiple ingredients in the same measuring column, simple copy the formula from one row to the next.

So what happens now?

The worksheet automatically adds up all the subtotals at the bottom. It also calculates the food cost percentage. These are handy numbers for you to know. You now know exactly how much a menu item costs in raw materials. You also know how much of the menu selling price that cost is; in this example, 36.6 percent.

Got questions? Feel free to comment below and I'll answer.

Jeff from Mocafe

Starting to look like a machine.  Just need to tie up some loose ends!!

A few nights ago I was with a good friend, hanging out in the garage, as he taught his young teenage daughter how to change the oil on a SUV. They were both under the truck, poking around, as he explained everything about oil's function in engines.

This time they spent together was pretty awesome to witness. I saw a dad and daughter bonding, as she understood that her dad was giving her life-skills toward independence. More importantly, he was spending time with her.

As they emerged, task completed, I handed both of themsteaming hot chocolates. I then intentionally wandered off for a walk down the street, to give them space to chitchat.

Jeff from Mocafe

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe

In my prior career as a executive chef, I wrote hundreds of work schedules. Let's look at some factors operators have to take into account in managing efficient production labor cost:

• Staff training and abilities
• Anticipated business volume
• Local event calendars
• Potential constraints (risks to the schedule)

The question today is, when you write a labor schedule, do you estimatehow much you're going to spend for each day and for the schedule time period on labor?

By Christoper Porter, Cofficer

First of all, my thanks go out to Heather and Jessica, the duo at Rock n’ Java (Twitter/Facebook) in Tucson, AZ, who greet me every morning, keep my cup full and make it difficult for me to call anywhere else my Coffice.

Having said that, let me ask you, my co-Cofficers, a question (in several parts): Do you know the names of the baristas you see everyday? Have you ever had a small talk conversation about their ambitions? Hobbies? The weather? Anything?!

If you say you don’t care, you should probably move on to another website. This won’t apply to you. There’s nothing to see here…more

Saturday mid-day.

I'm at Boston South Station, waiting for a bus up to northernNew Hampshire. It's hot. Really hot. Not only that, it's also wicked muggy.

I have a couple hours to kill, so I've been outside on Atlantic Avenue. Across the street is a brand new Dunkin' Donuts - not even open yet. The pavement and brick radiate the heat on me. I'm sweating like a dog.

I duck back inside to South Station and wander the food court, looking for one of my favorites; Mocafe Ice Blended Frappes.

Nada. Zilch. Zero. No Go At The Station.

Finally, I settle on a large lemonade from McDonalds. Definitely not my first choice, but it's got ice in it.

There's two independent coffee bars in Boston South Station. Neither offered frappes. If I had a Mocafe sample with me - I'd drop it off for them to try.

Jeff from Mocafe

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe

• customer perceptions and demands
• labor force skill, knowledge and passion and budget
• brand promise and message
• production space, design and storage

We'll come back to this topic again in the future, so for this blogpost, lets just focus on the second item; labor. Let me ask this question..

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe

• customer perceptions and demands
• labor force skill, knowledge and passion and budget
• brand promise and message
• production space, design and storage

We'll come back to this topic again in the future, so for this blogpost, lets just focus on the second item; labor. Let me ask this question..

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

Last weekend was the first day of the OC Fair in Costa Mesa, CA and boy was it packed!

Not only did it take fifteen minutes or so to find a parking space but there were hundreds of people in line waiting to buy tickets (good thing we already had ours, haha).  At least it was a gorgeous day out so time seemed to go by pretty quick.

Just launched my coffee blog:

www.shebrews.org

:) Flo