Coffee Vending Machines have many forms, features and brands and choosing the most suitable one for your office or workplace can seem to be an imposing task.

It is easy to be dazzled by the endless array of features and options it may even take a while to understand the language used by your Coffee Vending Machine provider. See out article Coffee Vending Machine – Useful Facts

We have prepared the following guide to assist you in determining the features and capacities that you require in your Coffee Vending Machine. Once you are clear about exactly what you need it becomes simple for us to help you identify which Vending Machine or Machines best match these requirements.

Step 1: Choose your preferred beverages

The most important first step is for you to determine the types of beverages you want to serve from your Coffee Vending Machine. Options include but are not limited to:

• Fresh Bean Coffee and Fresh Bean Decaffeinated Coffee
• Instant Coffee and Instant Decaffeinated Coffee
• Hot Chocolate, Mochaccino, Chai and Flavoured Coffees
• Hot water
• Hot Milk
• Soups

The number of choices you make will determine the number of canisters required – but there is a catch. In most good Vending Machines dried powders and water are combined in “mixing bowls” that can usually receive powders from multiple canisters prior to being dispensed. It is important to be aware that strong flavoured drinks cannot share the same mixing bowl as more delicately flavoured drinks – Spring Onion soup does not enhance the flavour of you Chai.

Step 2: Fresh Milk, Dried Milk or Both

Fresh Milk requires refrigeration, some additional mik frothing equipment, additional storage and more diligent cleaning – both the up front equipment cost and ongoing consumable cost are higher than with dried milk.

Dried Milk can come in a number of forms including granulated, powdered, skim, non-dairy and frothing varieties.

While fresh milk may be the first choice, the quality the dried milk has improved remarkably over recent times and in many cases it may be hard to distinguish the difference when a top quality dried milk is used in your Coffee Vending Machine.

Step 3: Tanked or Plumbed

Plumbed units do not need refilling so provide the greatest capacity of drinks for high volume or hassle free applications. These units are connected to mains water supply, usually through a set up that includes pressure reducer, water filter and stop tap or valve. Obviously the Coffee Machine needs to be located near a water supply.

Tanked units may operate from a gravity fed tank that can be filled by a hose, jug or bucket or they can use larger water tanks that can be placed in the base of the machine and utilise a small pump to feed the water into the machine for dispensing.

It must also be remembered that plumbed machines must be located near a mains water supply while tanked machines can be moved around without fuss.

Step 4: Storage Capacity

The storage capacity of the Coffee Vending Machine, including the amount of dried powders, coffee beans, milk and water is one of your most critical criteria for determining the type of Vending machine that best suits your application.

At a minium it is critical that during peoples of high use, such as morning tea and during lunch breaks, your Coffee Vending Machine can store sufficient quantity of hot beverages to minimise the need to refill.

Step 5: Dispending Capacity

Equally important as the volume of ingredients stored by your Coffee Vending Machine is the rate at which the available selections can be dispensed. To this end it is important to understand your need in terms of cups-per-hour that will need to be made during peak consumption times.

The number of cups per hour required may impact your decision to provide fresh bean coffee – which may take 20-40 seconds to grind the beans, tamp the ground coffee, extract the coffee and add milk or water depending on the selection. In higher output locations it may be necessary to provide either instant machines or provide multiple machines.

Step 6: Dispensing of Cups, Straws and Stirrers

Coffee Vending Machines can be completely self contained and even dispense disposable cups, sugar and stirrers. The advantage of this type of machine is that all of the consumables are contained within the machine itself and the beverage selections can be programmed specifically for the vending cups that are used by the machine. This also eliminates the need for additional space to store and display cups, stirrers and sugar.

Step 7: Financing Your Purchase

The final consideration to make once you have identified a machine that fits your needs is to determine the most suitable method of financing your purchase. Financing options such as leasing and rental may have certain tax benefits and can be beneficial in matching the cash inflow from beverage sales with the cash outflow of the ongoing consumable cost and monthly lease or rental payments, or at the very least spread the cash outflow over the life of the machine – Read more about our equipment finance options

Coffee Shrine make choosing your Coffee Vending Machine simple!. once you have completed the evalutaion above our feature search and feature comparison functionality make it easy to compare your Coffee Vending Machine options.

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Tags: coffee, coffee vending machines, office coffee machines

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Coffee Machines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.