role of technology in foodservice

Aberdeen Speciality Coffee Shop KirkView Café & Bistro Developed Coffee Blend with Blendly

Rob Milne and Samuel Dagostim – the owners of Kirk View Café & Bistro
on Union Terrace, Aberdeen, not only create great food but with the help of Scottish commercial roaster Blendly have developed their own speciality coffee blend.

“Coffee is so important and we were delighted to work with Blendly.co.uk in developing our own coffee blend. We have increased overall footfall as result, we are providing great coffee to our customers that would traditionally visit national chains from their daily coffee fix.

Samuel Dagostim, the South American partner in the restaurant wanted to capture the essence of great South American coffee “There’s no denying that Aberdeen, passionately embraced coffee. We have taken the time to create our own coffee blend based on some classic South American Beans using the skills of Blendly.co.uk and we were delighted quickly to see some great feedback”.

Blendly allow you to create and develop great coffee unique to your requirements

Kirk View Café and Bistro Group has been working with Blendly.co.uk, a Scottish based speciality coffee roaster and we were able to create a superb product with the help of the Blendly.co.uk team.

We understand that as part of our marketing mix it was important all our products in our bistro represent the best of local transparent produce and our coffee was so important.

Last year we spent £6.2 billion in coffee bars across the country, an increase of £400million on the year before. There are 16,500 coffee shops in Britain and the sector is booming – Developing a coffee that is our own allows us to stand out.

We also understand coffee may once have seemed frighteningly expensive, but many of us now see it as an affordable luxury, and for others, it is practically one of life’s basic necessities.

Coffee shops seem to have a truly universal appeal; they have captured the hearts of men, women and even children from all socio-economic groups. But it was women who drove the introduction of coffee shops to the UK, and it is women who drive many of their key features in the Kirk View Café.

The Kirk View Café takes nothing for granted, “It was such an original idea to incorporate attractive soft furnishings. Things that we take for granted today, allowing consumers to feel like they are in their own home.” This is especially important for our female customers as we have created a great place to drink great coffee. Our Coffee shop mean women are more likely to drive the look and feel of coffee experience and help us develop more innovation.

So there are plenty of reasons for all our coffee lovers to order up a coffee and stay in a relaxed environment and eat some great local food.

Barista Distribution Partners

At Blendly we are looking for baristas that can be the focus of a global supply chain and that can develop tastes and create coffee blends for their customers and their influence; the development of blending within your working and social environment.

Looking for something else, something as well as the thing you are doing, something that you can grow for yourself, and build into something you can make and call your own, something you can put your own signature on. Unique to you and your values

You will love nothing more than engaging with customers, you will understand that
you are the last link in a chain, the focus and point of connection, and you will have understood that focus is the representation of a global supply chain – that you are happy to represent.

You will enjoy creating and blending products, and presenting and serving these ideas to your customers.

We are looking for baristas to create their special coffee blends as well as develop their influence within their working environment, to advise customer coffee shop owners in how best to develop their coffee blend around the Blendly ecosystem.

If you are looking for a little bit more and are looking at building a passive income around your coffee knowledge then why not get in touch.

Why Coffee Is Changing Your Social Shopping Experience

Social shopping is becoming the new tool for customer engagement. It allows customers to interact with products and services without getting out from their homes. This e-commerce methodology is a shopping experience which is shared with your social network of friends and contacts.

Social shopping impacts an individual’s buying process by using social media networks to share, recommend, suggest and even comment on products and services. The idea behind social shopping is that individuals are influenced by their friend’s purchases and recommendations.

Coffee blends from Blendly are roasted with the customers’ palate in mind. All coffees are made to be enjoyed and shared as a part of your social coffee experience. This allows you to integrate your coffee shop and coffee flavour in to the changing needs of your customer and the moving landscape of the high street.

If you’d like to understand better how you can enhance your customer’s social shopping experience through your coffee blend, contact us through:

Mark Wilson
Owner at Blendly
mark@blendly.co.uk
07801 833821

6 Reasons Why Your Coffee Shop is Engine of Economic Growth

The “gig economy” is triumphing over everything else. As that trend gathers force and there is no reason why it should not, people who work for themselves are going to become an ever-more powerful economic and political force.

This “sharing” economy, pioneered by the likes of Uber and Airbnb, is opening up vast new opportunities for working for yourself; so is the spread of broadband, and well-funded start-ups – all those “unicorns”, the billion-plus dollar start-ups – love to take on lots of freelancers and don’t object to paying them pretty well

The rise of the “gig economy” will prove to be a powerful social trend, both in the UK and in most of the developed work. It shows no sign of slowing down – and it is going to impact the economy and the political system far more than most people yet realise.

Coffee shops are about work in another way, too: the rise of the “gig economy” – the proliferation of freelance workers, digital contractors and entrepreneurs who don’t have an office and can’t afford to rent one – has been crucial in shaping their new role.
With a new generation of gourmets emerging in the UK aged 18- 35 years old. These consumers are keen on food and drink with an authentic or distinctive positioning.
People’s Palate are changing none more so than how we enjoy our coffee, With more people purchasing barista style machines for their homes and purchasing more and more international origin coffees.
With the high street moving away from pre-blended Italian style coffee, The industry is in the curiosity for the “science” of coffee making—improving grinding methods, better monitoring of water quality, and the types of beans that make up blends, allowing customers to better identify with taste and content of what they are drinking.
The High Street is transforming and commentators see the high street is transforming from a pure shopping destination to a centre for “leisure and services” as the dramatic rise of the Internet changes the retail landscape.
The role of technology in food service has changed dramatically in the past few years, and no more so than in the UK, where mobile technology has infiltrated many aspects of regular consumer behaviour.

Is Your Coffee Shop Part of the Gig Economy

Coffee shops are about work in another way, too – the rise of the “gig economy”. The proliferation of freelance workers. Digital contractors and entrepreneurs who don’t have an office and can’t afford to rent one – has been crucial in shaping their new role.

The global research platform Allegra World Coffee Portal estimates 100% growth in the sector by 2020, outpacing the conventional coffee market year on year.

While the modern iteration of the coffee house is decidedly more subdued (pendant lighting, minimalist aesthetic, distressed wood) than the likes of Soho’s famed Le Macabre, where patrons sat on dark coffins and tapped their cigarette ash into skulls, Green says what they signify in the culture is similar.

The coffee house has always been a mark of sophistication … and a barometer of gentrification. Even going back to 1650s they were a sign of a rising tide of economic prosperity, because that’s when there was a trade boom.

Why choose Blendly?

Why choose Blendly? We at Blendly noticed that there are at least three degrees of operational activity ordinarily that lie between the consumer and their fresh coffee, restricting the range of options.

This traditional method of creating a commercial coffee blend was based around the coffee production and distribution that has been in place for many years.

It meant that coffee blends are sold pre-blended.
Customers that wanted to create their own product had a restricted range of choices
The Process for blend creation was time-consuming

The ability for customers to create their own coffee blend was slow time consuming, development of your coffee taste was never local and the choices available was limited Coffee blends also tend to lack transparency with regard to the content of the product and the available colours

The Blendly ecosystem allows volumised, customised and transparent coffee blends to be developed.

It allows customers to create their own blend that is unique to the service they want to provide. This creates access to coffee blending as a service and will remove the need to store fresh coffee by intermediaries and distributors.

The Rise of the Speciality Roaster

The rise in speciality coffee culture is widely attributed to a growing number of artisan roasters and specialist independent coffee shops that are reinvigorating the coffee scene and leading the way into the fourth wave of coffee culture, bringing with them an exciting range of single origin and micro-lot coffees that are batch roasted for optimum flavour.

According to a recent Allegra Strategies report looking into the “Future of Coffee”, the speciality coffee segment is expected to see 13% year-on-year growth, outperforming the 10% growth predicted for the UK coffee market as a whole. The same report suggests that the market for speciality coffee will increase by 100% by 2020. Now that is some serious growth by any standards!

The challenge for the small Speciality coffee Roaster are in creating a standard production base that can create a Consistency in the product as well as be developing a scale that can be relied on for mission-critical products delivery.

Your coffee shop is defined by its coffee. With so many choices out there, you must admit buying coffee can be complicated. That’s why we created Blendly with fresher, better and quicker ways to roast and blend.

Blendly allows you to choose what goes into your bag of coffee, allowing you to explore and create your own product and delivered fresh within few days to your door straight from our speciality coffee factory.

Your Blendly coffee allows you to create your own labelled coffee brand; to share with other people within your network

Because your blend is from selection of global speciality green beans that are roasted on demand, your blend is unique to YOU

Your blendly marketplace account offers a list of preselected blends that can quickly be modified for any specific pallet or purpose and tools to allow you to plan your coffee usage by predictive ordering so that you never run out of fresh coffee

And to make it all better, Blendly support team can help you to taste match from your existing supplier, to making your coffee fresher, better and quicker.

Visit us at blendly.co.uk to know more about this.

Kimbo Coffee and Blendly

Blendly is selling coffee around Scotland, giving value and choice and setting new opportunities for coffee outlets to develop there own coffee taste and flavours.

Kimbo coffee was developed in the espresso bars of Naples which provide the heartbeat of this incredible lively and exciting city. Here, over fifty years ago, one business to meet the local demand. This thriving business grew and continues today. Through seeking the finest green coffees from around the world, they blend, roast and package fine espresso coffee that makes Kimbo a leader in the Italian market. Today, Kimbo exports successfully in many countries and here in London we are proud to represent this wonderful business and convert the public to the finest coffee experience possible- espresso Italiano!

Despite those facts, Blendly is still able to complete by having a much more flexible production base and can offer customers a great range of coffee tastes by allowing them to create their own coffee blends rather than the static mass produces. They offer customers direct access to production and scheduling software allowing coffee to be blended fresh and quickly saving time and money.

Blendly also allows customers to select from a range of commodities to extend the taste and make the coffee more unique to themselves making it their own coffee blend.

Blendly offers next day delivery and other Barista services.

Check them out at at blendly.co.uk.