One of the opening sessions at Caffè Culture 2018 (London) was the automation debate. Whilst no one was suggesting the complete removal of humans from the specialty coffee making process, there was a healthy discussion of an increasingly important topic.
Nick Mabey (of Assembly Coffee) was a proponent of automation to a higher degree, whilst Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood (Colonna and Smalls, Colonna Coffee) recognises the importance of automation tech in the process of creating a great coffee experience, but was more questioning of being able to “replace” a barista with technology in the longer term.
The panel also included Andrew Tolley of Taylor St. Baristas and Will Little of Roastworks.
Firstly, it was clear that no one on the panel believes an automated machine exists today that can make a coffee to the standards expected in a specialty coffee shop.
There is, however, a broad consensus of recognising the importance of technology improvements that can help in the procedural steps of extracting and preparing specialty coffee (think volumetric, gravimetric, auto-dosing, fine grained controls on a roaster).
The future-thinking position here is that technology and automation would create a significant shift in the way coffee operators staff their businesses. An automated coffee machine, to specialty standards, would liberate a barista to spend more time on value-add activities, delivering an improved customer experience and educating the customer.
There’s an argument that the baristas of today do not necessarily want to be using their hands day-in-day-out to make coffee in the future, but it’s likely they would want leverage their knowledge and experience and continue to work in the world coffee. With that in mind, automating repetitive tasks could lead to an increase of retained knowledge and skill within the industry.
There was agreement that technology improvements have helped - and continue to help - baristas in the procedural steps of making coffee.
For example, an auto-dosing grinder that can dose out coffee to the nearest 0.1g allows for more control and quicker recipe iteration, and gravimetric machines ensure customers get a consistent recipe to spec (and allows a barista to spend 20–30 seconds on another task in parallel).
So, in a world where the robot baristas are kept at bay, technology will continue to offer incremental improvements to the processes and workflows of baristas.
Speaking from a position of having overseen the training of over a thousand baristas, Andrew Tolley (Taylor St. Baristas) believes you can’t overstate the importance of the barista in the coffee shop experience. To him, automation does not remove the need for a barista, but it does start to morph the role of the barista into that of a knowledge worker. This person is able to tweak variables and processes, at a highly granular level, to suit the coffee and the customer.
But what about the customer; what do they want? Certainly whole swathes of the general population have become familiar with the idea of bean-to-cup. Costa Coffee have deployed over 8,000 of their branded machines across the UK and internationally. The specialty customer, however, is a little more discerning.
In a competitive specialty market, serving a coffee-educated customer something straight out of a machine is going to be the quickest way to lose their business.
Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple though. As you move further away from population centres, the pool of trained - or even willing - specialty baristas drops off sharply. Will Little set up Roastworks coffee in Devon, and has a very different take on where the line is between human and automation. His priority is for his coffee to be made well and enjoyed by the customer - it is a challenge to repeatedly support cafes with training seasonal or temporary staff.
In this scenario, more automation would lead to an improvement in the quality and consistency of coffees made, which is ultimately in the interest of the customer.
Andrew Tolley concluded that as an industry, automation and technology help us to focus on coffee quality, consistency and experience. These are the key factors that ultimately attract and retain customers.
If a local market is out of balance and more automation will lead to more customers, it’s certain we will start to see a shift in the way coffee is made.
Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash.