When you find yourself in the position to help select the best office coffee for your company’s break room, you are in for a treat. This is an exciting journey and the Corporate Essentials team is here to provide you with a quick guide to the most important stops along the way to help you feel confident in the decisions you are about to make.
Get comfortable, relax and know that you are getting the best advice from experts with going on two decades of experience in the office coffee arena.
Consider your needs
The first step in a fruitful office coffee relationship has to be knowing what your team needs. Start by doing a survey of key staff to see what they are looking for in the break room, maybe they just want coffee, but the odds are if you ask, you will find there is a wide ranging selection of beverages and potentially snacks that the staff in your building would like to see available.
This is not to say you should honor every single request, but by taking the time to assess various requests you can establish a clearer picture of what people would like to have on site. In doing so, you can create a short list of must-have items your ideal office coffee vendor will provide.
Ask around
There is much to be said about asking people who they use for office coffee services in your area – good, bad or indifferent, the reactions people have to their office coffee experience provide valuable information for you in your own search for the best office coffee.
If your go-to people fail to provide you with more than a couple recommendations, hit the internet and seek out office coffee solutions. Look into the top results, read their online reviews and see what else you can learn about the companies in question.
The more you know about a potential workplace coffee vendor before hand, the less effort it will take to ensure you are getting the best office coffee service delivered to your business.
Face to face
Once you have a shortlist of vendors, do some pro/con comparisons and see how those vendors stack up against the needs you and your team have identified for your business. Hopefully, this will leave you with a shorter shortlist of possible office coffee services who you can then start consulting with to find a great fit.
The best office coffee comes from an office coffee service that truly understands your company’s needs – this often extends beyond just your need for conical versus flat-bottomed coffee filters, and into the fine-tuning that your coffee service may eventually require to build the amazing office coffee culture you have read so much about.
Meet the coffee reps, ask them all the questions you can come up with and see how you feel about their ability to respond. We delight in being given the opportunity to come up with unique answers to clever questions from our potential clients – so feel free to try to challenge coffee vendors who come courting.
Sample the wares
That Simple Simon nursery rhyme taught a valuable lesson: taste the wares. You never know what you are really signing on for if you cannot try it first, and in the case of office coffee, it is vital that you get what you expect.
The best office coffee vendors take great pride in their product portfolio and will gladly set you up with a limited sample of the products you and your teams are likely to enjoy. Host an office coffee tasting in the morning or afternoon and invite your teams to come and see what they think of your potential coffee supplier.
You might only drink black coffee from Columbia, but odds are the palate of people across your organization is more diverse, and it is important to offer a wide variety of options that caters to the lion’s share of tastes.
Pick the gear
Now you are well on the way to having a great office coffee arrangement, you get to the really fun part – shopping. With the guidance of your coffee representative, you will need to select the right kind of coffee makers to cater to the needs of your office.
Whether that is single-serve, bulk-brewing units or a combination of different types of equipment, a great office coffee service will be able to help you understand the differences, producing the best office coffee for your team in no time.
We hope that after five steps you feel relieved at how easy the process of finding the best office coffee for your workplace can be. If you need some reassurance about finding the best coffee options for your office, contact our team of experts today.
