Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/58144
Cold drink equipment The right kind of blending equipment can make custom cold drinks fast, easy and quiet. BY PAN DEMETRAKAKES W hether it's a milkshake in an ice-cream shop or a smoothie in a coff eehouse, a cold drink oſt en has to be blended on specialized equipment. Th at requires counter space for the equipment, training for the staff and, oſt en, noise toleration for the customers. Th e right kind of equipment can minimize all three. Blenders allow coff eehouses to make cold drinks completely to order, while customization is at best limited with batch equipment like granita machines. (Th e obvious tradeoff is that, once a strong demand for a particular drink is established, batch equipment requires much less labor.) "I think that coff eehouses in particular would be more inclined to purchase a high-quality commercial blender as opposed to a slush machine, just from the simple fact that there are so many options in blended drinks these days," says Joanne Donna, president of Tropical Impressions, which supplies cold drink ingredients and distributes equipment. "Just having a slush machines limits you to one or two fl avors." Coff eehouse proprietors need the same things from cold- drink equipment as from the rest of their machinery: reliability, ease of use, and consistency paired with versatility. Another, unique factor comes into play with blenders and mixers: noise. Hot-drink equipment tends to be relatively quiet—or when it's not, its noise fi ts into the general coff eehouse vibe, like the hiss of an espresso machine. Blenders and mixers oſt en operate at high volume, especially when they crunch ice cubes. Th is short, shrill roar can shatter a café's atmosphere. QUIET DOWN Th e most common way to muffl e noise is to fi t the blender inside an enclosure. Th is increases the equipment's footprint, adds an extra step to the process and makes cleaning and 28 | March 2012 • www.specialty-coffee.com maintenance a little harder, but many coff eehouse owners fi nd those tradeoff s worth it. Vitamix goes a step further with its Quiet One blender. Th e Quiet One features a "fl oating enclosure," attached to the blender's base (where the motor is located) by magnets. Th is buff ers the vibration, cutting the blender's noise. Th e motor also is secured by magnets, for more buff ering. As a result, the Quiet One operates at up to 18 decibels less than competitive equipment, says Tony Ciepiel, chief operating offi cer of Vitamix. "If you're a coff ee shop and you're concerned about creating a certain experience inside that coff ee shop, and you don't want your customers to be bothered or disrupted in their conversation or concentration because of blending noise, then this is the perfect unit for you, because it will maintain the experience that you're trying to achieve within your store," Ciepiel says. Another requirement is ease of operation. A blender or mixer isn't as complex as an espresso machine, but its operative profi le can still make a diff erence in a drink's overall quality. Profi les for diff erent kinds of drinks can be built into equipment. Island Oasis supplies blender/shavers—machines that crush ice cubes from a top reservoir into granules, then blend them into drinks. When a machine is delivered, Island Oasis personnel program them with customized drink profi les, then train the staff in how to use them. "We set it up and, depending on the glass size, we have to kind of fi ddle round with the machine a little bit to make sure the ice fl ow is correct, and then they're good to go," says Mark Malkin, Island Oasis' director of marketing and training. Vitamix mixers come with 34 preprogrammed recipes and can, like Island Oasis equipment, be custom-programmed. By hooking up a laptop to the unit, Vitamix installers can develop a sophisticated blending profi le. By changing the duration and