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Working in partnership with a Bristol based legal firm, Office Beverages, a division of Office Water Coolers, have proven the demand for healthy, high quality hot drinks and great service that can significantly reduce costs in the office environment.

At Office Beverages we have developed a new concept in beverage service to meet the growing trend for freshly brewed speciality hot drinks for the office.

In larger offices traditional vending machines are often used as the only source of instant hot drinks and drinking water. The market perception of the old vending machine is one of poor quality and hassle, when in reality they are delivering high volumes of consistently made drinks.

We identified that the office environment typically has staff that are demanding better quality drinks, with no artificial ingredients, and will go out of the way to get one or two coffee shop style drinks each day; they would typically be paying between £1.50 to £2.90 per drink and typically taking between 5 to 15 minutes for each visit to the shop.

Working with our customer, we have successfully replaced four large, free standing, expensive vending machines set on free vend, dispensing instant dried ingredients, with one of our serviced beverage stations. This coffee shop quality system produces fresh brew teas, coffees, cappuccino, espresso, latte, mocha, hot chocolate and a range of wellbeing drinks such as Japanese green tea, exotic chai, raspberry spark, peppermint, Lemon calm and even rooibos i.e. a very wide range of natural hot drinks.

The beverage stations we provided are self service, easy to use and produce a very high quality drink.

Working with our customer we ran a trial where their 250 plus staff had the choice of either free vended drinks, or coffee shop quality fresh brew drinks, in large paper cups, priced at £0.50 each. This setup, with the choice of free low grade drinks verses paid for fresh brew drinks, was an experiment in customer choice and the changing culture towards quality and healthy drinks. In the first few months we sold a few hundred drinks per week compared to the several thousand free drinks. However, as our fresh brew drinks system covered all its operating costs, we were able to reduce the price to £0.30, and as a result drink sales doubled and yet the staff contribution still covered all the operating costs including the drinks themselves.

After nearly two years we have replaced all the large vending machines, that were costing our customer over £20,000 per year in operating and ingredient costs, with a self funding highly valued drinks service. We are now charging just £0.10 per drink and our customer contributes less than £5000 for this fully managed service.

Not only has this saved our customer over £15000 per annum, the reduction in the local coffee shop sales has proved that staff are no longer leaving the work place to purchase drinks and that they value the low cost, high quality alternative to the old instant drinks. With the addition of some mains-fed water coolers, our customer is now able to provide healthy hot drinks and good hydration to its staff.

Our customer has managed the change from free vended drinks to a part funded healthy solution that is valued by their staff; this not only improves the wellbeing of their staff but significantly reduces costs.

You may also be interested to know that our Office Wellbeing division conducts health checks using our Water Wellpoint kiosk; the tests include hydration levels and, using the device, we have found that typically over 60% of employees are continuously dehydrated. Our research has led us to develop products and services that provide quality drinks and good hydration solutions in the workplace.

Download this case study as a pdf

Peter Brooks

© 2012 Office Water Coolers

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