Depend greatly on your office or restaurant coffee needs, different offices have different requirement for coffee machines, and different F&B outlet faces different crowds. There are mainly 3 types of coffee machine; capsules, bean-to-cup, and instant hot beverage machine. Here are some of the questions we always ask our customers before recommending them the right coffee machine.

How many cups of coffee serve per day?

Office headcounts or cups of coffee served per day is the most important question, as it highly defines the budget, type of machine, and how many units of machine your office should get. If an office has high consumption of coffee daily, then instant hot beverage and bean-to-cup machine would be more cost effective, as capsules are more expensive in terms of consumables.

For small offices, you can select the machine without extended waste drawer or large water tank, to maximise cost as it those are meant for higher consumption office, but still enjoy quality coffee as the main parts of machines are usually consistent in functionality.

Are you expecting a busy morning/lunch/meeting crowd?

In terms of effectiveness, Instant hot beverage would definitely use lesser dispensing time, at about 30 seconds per cup.  For automated bean-to-cup machine, it would take from 40 seconds to 2 mins, depending on the beverage. If you would expect a heavy crowd that would need to minimize on every second wasted, we would suggest to get more than one machine.

Coffee Quality

Undoubtedly automated bean-to-cup machine can produce better quality coffee, as it is freshly grinded and brewed from fresh coffee beans. Instant powder is often mixed with sugar and milk powder or creamer, whereas automated bean-to-cup machine is brewed without sugar and only through fresh milk of your choice, therefore taste is greatly enhanced. For people who prefers sweeter coffee, they can always add sugar from the side and this gives drinkers a flexibility to tweak their coffee to their liking

Budget

For personal use, a capsule machine would be more cost effective as the machine itself would usually cost much lesser. However, for office use, the other 2 choices might be more cost effective. In comparison between both machines, a hot beverage machine would definitely cost lesser. However, since the coffee dispensed from automated bean-to-cup machine is of gourmet quality, the comparison might not be an accurate representation.  It would cost much lesser if you compare it to the coffees you usually get from cafes.

Height constraints

One major issue is with the height of the coffee machines. Very often, customer purchased a machine that does not fit into the existing space catered for the machine. Or they would purchase a machine that fits too nicely, without having allowance space for the topping up of power and coffee beans from the top. Do measure the space you have in your pantry before picking your preferred machine!