choosing the right automatic machine...made easy!

The tea leaves are delivered into a brewing unit and infused with water before being dispensed into the cup. The end result is a highly palatable cup of tea. The downside is that the process takes time to complete, as the tea has to take time to brew. If your staff have set tea breaks and you have large numbers waiting for drinks at the same time, this can cause problems. If this is the case, then the freeze-dried tea granules might be your best bet. You could be forgiven for thinking that there are multitudes of different types of coffee available for vending, but in fact there are only two!!! Filter Coffee, Ground Coffee and Freshbrew Coffee, are in fact exactly the same product! This is the coffee used in the pour and serve machines with the glass jugs that we discussed earlier. The coffee requires brewing time and is dispensed through a brewer in precisely the same way as the Leaf Tea. A recent addition to this is the introduction of Espresso machines into which coffee beans are placed in a hopper. The beans are the ground in the machine and the coffee is then prepared. All of the above represent the highest quality coffee and real coffee drinkers will insist on drinking ground coffee. The second type of coffee is Instant Coffee. This comes in two different types, spray dried, which is a powder, and freeze-dried which is a granule coffee. (Gold Blend is freeze-dried, and the original Nescafe is spray dried) The quality of freeze dried coffee is by far the best and in fairness most vending companies would only use freeze dried coffee in their Instant machines, unless a particular customer had a preference for a type of spray dried, for example Brazilian coffee. Decaffeinated coffee is available in both ground and instant coffee. If you have a significant number of staff who drink decaffeinated coffee, this may be something you might wish to consider. Do you want your staff to drink ground coffee or instant coffee? You may decide you would like them to have a choice, and there are machines on the market that will provide both, but pricewise, these tend to be at the top end of the range. The most popular Tea/Coffee combination right now is freshbrew tea and instant coffee. There is a fallacy that lots of people like to drink soups from vending machines in the winter. In reality very little soup is sold from vending machines, and if you can save money by leaving out the soup option, then this might be worth considering.

3. Do you want to be able to use your own cups, do you want to have the facility to make pots of tea, or jugs of coffee?

As I have mentioned previously all fully automatic machines will dispense disposable cups.

If you would like occasionally to have drinks dispensed into a china cup, (for directors, or visitors, for example), then this option is also available on some machines. Some models have a button that you press for “No Cup”, whereas the more sophisticated models will automatically dispense a disposable cup only if no china cup is in place. In other words if you want to use a china cup, you place it into the machine and the machine will not dispense a disposable cup. Many machines these days have pot or jug facility, which is either operated by a key switch or a button. This enables the user to put a teapot or coffee jug into the machine and dispense a multiple vend. This is particularly useful for meetings etc.,

vendingabc is from cafe azzurro limited