Make some £ savings
Cafés don’t make coffee for the fun of it – they are there to make a living for the café owners and staff. In 2024/5 making profit from running a café is far from easy, with employment costs, business rates and food hygiene standards legislation all conspiring to keep the cost of eating and drinking out very high indeed.
In this blog we count the pounds and see what can be done to save significant ££s while still having that wonderful treat of speciality coffee.
It’s a real treat to go out and meet a friend or read a good book in a great café, and well worth the cost to be served, and to drink the best coffees. But doing that several times each week, and the cost will drain your wallet or hammer your credit card.
It’s just as costly buying a flat white or latte in a high street café or on the station platform as part of your daily commute. Individually, you may not notice the cost of doing it once, but as the weeks and months pass by, the cost does mount up considerably.
For most people, including anyone who spends some days each week working from home, and those who take a travel mug on their daily commute, it makes financial sense to make great coffee for yourself.
Buying your coffee on-the-move:
Obviously, the cost of a single coffee-to-go varies widely, and so does the quality. We have presented an AVERAGE cost models here, with the least cost and most expensive that we could find in our area on the south coast. We have built in purchasing one coffee per day for 5 days per week, for 45 weeks per year.
Flat White/Medium Latte £4 x 5 days = £20 x 45 weeks = £900 per year
The overall cost for doing the above for THREE years would be £2,700
Buying your own equipment and speciality beans from GetMeCoffee:
With the aim of making the best possible coffee at home, we recommend the following equipment:
Budget version (still very good quality espresso, basic equipment at lower cost, with fewer features and simple configurable options)
- De-Longhi espresso machine
- Wilfa espresso coffee grinder
- Knock box, milk wand wipes
To set yourself up at home with everything you need to make fabulous coffee, the once off purchase cost would be £320.
To buy a 500g pack of (espresso grind) speciality coffee each month (enough to make about 40 double espresso) would cost £12 (so twelve packs per year = £144)
To buy two pints of cow’s milk or oat alternative would cost £1.30 (£58 per year)
The overall cost over three years for making fabulous coffee at home is £780
CONCLUSION:
Whichever way you look at it, the saving over three years is more than £500 per year or £1,500
That’s enough for a very good holiday in the sun, or even to fly round the world. The interesting thing for me when I did the maths above is that you even make a saving in the first year by buying your own equipment!
And then the saving for the following years just keeps adding up. Your espresso machine should last for many years providing you do very simple basic maintenance.
To present a balanced view for this blog we also looked at the downsides of making your own coffee at home vs buying on the station platform, or in the hight street. A very low level of cleaning and maintenance is necessary for your espresso machine to be reliable – allow for an average of 5 minutes each week to ensure your espresso machine stays in tip top condition, plus 30 seconds every day to wipe down machine and surrounding surfaces.
