A coffee machine for the staff room

The staff room is where workplace coffee policy gets decided, usually by accident. A kettle, a jar of instant, a pod machine someone brought from home, and a sign about washing your own mug. Schools, practices, councils, and site offices all have one.

A coffee machine for a staff room has a narrow brief. Breaks are short, nobody is trained, and nobody wants to be the person who looks after it. That is the brief an automatic bean-to-cup machine is built for.

What the room needs

Power, water, and a bench. That is the list. If the water is a tap at the sink, the machine runs from a tank someone fills. If there is no bench, there is no machine yet.

We put the machine in. We do not rebuild the kitchenette, supply milk or cups, or train anyone. Getting a machine installed is the full checklist, and it reads the same for a staff room as for an office kitchen. We install around Sydney from Forestville.

Why a button suits a short break

A staff room break arrives all at once and ends on time. A traditional espresso machine needs someone who knows how to use it, with a queue behind them. Pods are quick, and the capsule bill grows with every meeting. Instant is cheap, and it is why people walk out to buy a cup. What instant really costs is that bill.

An automatic machine grinds whole beans for each cup and pours at a button. Arico installs a Saeco Royal Plus. Anyone on the roster can use it on their first day.

Count the breaks, not the payroll

A staff room drinks in bursts: recess, lunch, the change of shift. Plan the beans for how many people come through in a day, not the number of names on the payroll. Part-timers and rotating shifts make the real number smaller than it looks.

An office of twenty is the working example. Twenty people, two cups, about 7 grams a cup as a planning dose, twenty working days: about 5.6 kilograms, so plan around 6 or 7. A staff room with forty names and half of them in on any given day is closer to that sketch than to double it. The first month corrects the guess.

Who pays, and who looks after it

Staff rooms often run on a coffee club: a tin, a monthly levy, or the organisation paying outright. Any of those work. The order is one monthly bean delivery, from as little as 40 cents a cup. The machine, servicing, and tech support are $0 while that order continues. How the free machine works is the terms in one place.

On site, someone empties the grounds, keeps water in the tank, and fills the hopper. When the machine stops for any other reason, that is ours to sort. Who services the machine is what that covers, without a timed promise.

What to check before you ask

Whether the people who would use it can agree on one coffee. Whether the bench is near a power point. Whether your organisation needs a supplier approved before anything goes in, even a machine that costs $0.

Those three answers decide whether the staff room gets a machine. The rest is a bean order.