Bike cafés: a questionnaire

[Cyril Haearn]

Is the weather changeable down there? Up here it might be 22° one day and 8° the next, one would have to do a quick conversion from ice-cream and cold drinks to lentil soup and tea

For publicity you could rope in the media, may one put up advertising signs anywhere?

I like fixed-centre holidays but many cyclists like to keep moving on

[Brucey]

some suggestions/differentiators for your café;

- menu ought perhaps to pander to local tastes as well as 'generic cyclist' tastes
- some 'normal folk' object to sharing their space with (potentially sweaty) cyclists, so an area for each might be best, if there is space for it?
- if there is no bike shop nearby having a few spare parts (tubes, brake blocks etc) 'on the menu' might be a good idea?
- offer to show cycling videos etc to customers
- have the weather forecast (and mountain road condition/closure information etc) on a chalkboard
- offer 'cyclist packed lunches' which are wrapped and can be stuffed into a back pocket (thinks; do they know about Cornish pasties thereabouts...?)
- offer cyclist-favoured snack bars, flapjacks etc
- offer stuff in 'regular' or 'hungry cyclist' sized portions
- offer some facilities for drying stuff when it is wet

Basically I think you will get more trade if you think of as many reasons as possible for a cyclist to stop and visit instead of ride straight past your café.

cheers

[Canuk]

Is the weather changeable down there? Up here it might be 22° one day and 8° the next, one would have to do a quick conversion from ice-cream and cold drinks to lentil soup and tea

For publicity you could rope in the media, may one put up advertising signs anywhere?

I like fixed-centre holidays but many cyclists like to keep moving on

The weather is very stable April to October with very little variations. It ranges in these months from 18C-30C-18C again. October is particularly lovely for cycling but the summer is truly a sensation. Just about every day sunshine for 3 months solid. Advertising have to be applied for in writing six months in advance, and Facebook has quite a low impact in France...

[slowster]

I know absolutely nothing about running a cafe. Luckily we have a retired woman in the village who ran a shop, so we have someone to train people on the tills and keeping stock up to date.

Right, so that's two of you who know nothing about running a cafe. A cafe is not a shop. I know nothing about running a cafe and despite that I suspect that I know more than you, which does not bode well.

Do you have anyone familiar with the food hygiene, safety and regulatory requirements for selling prepared food and drink in France. Do you have anyone with the relevant required training and qualifications? Cold food like pastries, cake and prepared sandwiches is one of the highest risk categories, so your hygiene etc. has to be absolutely scrupulous.

there's quite a nice empty old video store we could probably rent cheaply off the council

Fitting it out to meet the relevant hygiene requirements may not be so cheap.

that's potentially 190 customers. But how best to retain them? Loyalty cards, club discount, free coffee once a month?

I would aim to attract and retain customers all by one thing - the best quality food and drinks possible. I would put all my efforts into that, with no gimmicks or special discounts.

I'm also charged with sourcing the coffee machine and coffee as it's prohibitively expensive here in France. I go to Italy regularly on business so there's a potential there, but anyone know good, tasty British coffee suppliers?

I think the business models of coffee shops in the UK fall into three distinct categories: the big chains like Starbucks, small lower quality independents, and the better quality independents. I think the small lower quality independents typically get their espresso machine and grinder etc. on lease (or possibly 'free') as part of a deal with a roastery/coffee supplier which commits them to buy X amount of coffee each week from that supplier. The good quality independents will be more selective about both which roastery they buy coffee from, and also about what equipment they use, and they will not lock themselves into a deal with a roastery in return for 'cheap' or leased equipment. Coffeehit (https://www.coffeehit.co.uk/) is the leading UK equipment supplier to the best of the independents. The best UK roasters include the likes of Square Mile (https://shop.squaremilecoffee.com/) and Hasbean (https://www.hasbean.co.uk/), but I doubt it's viable to import from them into France.

If I were you, I would aim to start small and keep the start up costs as low as possible. Given the cost of purchasing, installing and maintaining an espresso machine and training staff to use it properly and the time required for them to develop the skill to consistantly produce good espresso coffee very quickly one after another, I would instead buy a big grinder like the Mahlkonig EK43 (https://www.coffeeitalia.co.uk/mahlkonig-ek43.html - but if possible a used one in good condition and at a good price, rather than new), which has a reputation for giving the best grind for brewed coffee. Instead of an espresso machine and all the anciliary equipment, I would buy a large number of cafetieres (mostly the one person 0.35l ones and probably the cheaper glass versions rather than more expensive stainless ones, providing breakage rates were OK) and serve the coffee in those with a Bodum timer (https://www.bodum.com/gb/en/5635-294b-clip-timer) or a 4 minute egg timer, for customers to press the plunger and pour out the coffee themselves.

In the same vein I would investigate if the costs and difficulties associated with making and preparing food could be minimised. It's rural France, so do you have a good boulangerie/patisserie in the village that would supply you with cakes? That might be a win-win for both of you: the patisserie gets more orders and a further outlet for their products, and by buying in the cakes you keep the associated start up costs low and eliminate the difficulties associated with buying ingredients for and preparing and baking your own cakes and pastries.

[mjr]

Instead of an espresso machine and all the anciliary equipment, I would buy a large number of cafetieres (mostly the one person 0.35l ones and probably the cheaper glass versions rather than more expensive stainless ones, providing breakage rates were OK) and serve the coffee in those with a Bodum timer (https://www.bodum.com/gb/en/5635-294b-clip-timer) or a 4 minute egg timer, for customers to press the plunger and pour out the coffee themselves.

If you do that, get some decent pourover sets too, because IMO you might as well serve capsule coffee as the thin-yet-sludgey disappointments served in most cafe cafetieres.

[Canuk]

We have a boulangerie on our doorstep and I'm sure we could arrange a good discount on bread /croissants ect. A lot of the volunteers are excellent bakers so we're not going to be short of a high volume of good quality cakes and biscuits. H + S regimes are a little more relaxed here, and the checks are nominal after you've started up.
We probably won't be doing any cooking on the premises so that's a bonus, but we have already made good inroads into getting a drinks licence. Which is really important to any French cafe.

Our ambition is not to invest too much in it until we can gauge the response and the volume of passing trade.

[Cyril Haearn]

Invest? H+S?

Hope porridge is on the menu, the mark-up is very high if you buy 50 kg sacks of oats

Will it be a business with risks, overdraft, bank loans etc, crowdfunding or what, which legal entity do you plan to use?

Is there competition nearby?

Business history, development and decline is very interesting, yesterday someone told me about some crazy guys who started a small model railway many years ago, it is the biggest in the world now, 300+ staff, has plans through 2028

[JakobW]

To add to a note of warning: I can't find failure rates for cafes as such, but for new restaurants it's about 60% in the first three years (which is ballpark similar to failure rates for small businesses generally). For hospitality stuff, getting the location right to attract sufficient trade is crucial.

I suspect unless you've got lots of enthusiasts among your volunteers you're better off aiming to run a good cafe that will attract cyclists, rather than a 'cycling cafe'; none of the cafes my local clubs stop at are the latter. Good food in generous portions at reasonable prices (and good cake! Good coffee also helps) is the major factor in getting the club to stop somewhere; space to park up bikes within view of the seating is another big plus.

I'm more likely to stop at a self-proclaimed cycling cafe when riding or touring solo (or, for urban cafes, even without a bike!), and might well linger a bit longer - places like this often show the racing on a screen, and have a variety of cycling books/magazines to leaf through. Other handy things to have are a track pump/tool kit/locks to borrow, and tubes for sale (though from the shop's POV having a huge range of consumables - brake pads etc. - is probably not worthwhile). Similarly, caps, bidons, etc. with the cafe's branding are not going to make huge amounts of money, but are nice souveniers for touring cyclists. As mentioned, selling some form of portable sustenance is helpful, even if it's only the more solid cakes (flapjacks etc.), or even the humble banana...

[Cyril Haearn]

There was a thread about Hartside Cafe, that would be worth checking

[flat tyre]

As far as I'm concerned; requirements for a cycling café are - cakes, coffee and tea plus plenty of water, quick lunches with carbs but not huge plates (e.g. macaroni cheese, quiche, bacon sarnie, filled baguettes/rolls), overflow seating area in case it gets busy, bike parking.
Re the bike parking, one café near me has put up a couple of horizontal scaffold poles about 3m long and about 1.5 m off the ground, room for plenty of bikes hung up on the pole by the saddle with the front wheel on the ground, bikes can easily be locked onto the pole if you are security conscious.

[mjr]

Only go with saddle hanging if the only cyclists welcome are racing snakes. I won't use such racks after my saddle clip was damaged by one and I shudder to think what it would do to a Brooks ssaddle on a laden tourer.

Wise words above. Not sure how porridge goes in France. Always worth keeping flapjacks in stock. Cycle cafes I've known outside of London, MK and Norfolk don't seem to have lasted. Regular cafes that are cycle friendly do seem to last longer.

[flat tyre]

offer 'cyclist packed lunches' which are wrapped and can be stuffed into a back pocket (thinks; do they know about Cornish pasties thereabouts...?)

Noooo Cornish pasty in back pocket...a disaster waiting to happen!

[slowster]

If you do that, get some decent pourover sets too, because IMO you might as well serve capsule coffee as the thin-yet-sludgey disappointments served in most cafe cafetieres.

There are pros and cons to each of the various methods for brewed coffee, not only in terms of the taste of the product but also the practicality in a cafe setting. One of my reasons for suggesting cafetieres is that you effectively outsource part of the process to the customer, leaving them to press the plunger and pour it out, which also involves them in the process of producing the drink (like, say, filling your own tortillas or spring rolls in a restaurant, which is part of the whole experience of the meal).

The reason for the sludgey nature of most caferiere coffee and the fact that it's usually not considered the best of the brewed coffee methods, is partly down to the grinders. Most grinders, including those manufactured for commercial use to make espresso, tend to produce a wide range of particle sizes, including a significant percentage of fines. Those fines produce the sludge in non-paper filter coffee and also negatively affect the taste because their large ratio of surface area to volume results in over-extraction. In other words, by the end of the 4 minute optimum period for the extracting flavour from the larger particles of ground coffee bean, a lot of flavours that you don't want will also have been extracted from the fines.

The Mahlkonig EK43 grinder I mentioned is reckoned to be the best grinder for brewed coffee because it produces the most uniform particle sizes with the minimum of fines (and there are number of top end baristas who do also use it for espresso in their shops). Hence my suggesting it: it's no good offering coffee that customers can and do make as well or better themselves at home - you need to make significantly bettter coffee, and you will need a better grinder, better beans and better technique to achieve that.

I would suggest you stick with just one method, whether pourover, Aeropress, Chemex or cafetiere, and make sure that you are very good and consistant with it.

I said it probably would not be viable to import your coffee from the UK, but checking Hasbean's website I see they do ship internationally, and one of their commercial customers is a high end coffee shop in Paris, Telescope (and in Google photographs, you see they serve Aeropress in addition to espresso, and have a Mahlkonig EK43).

So buying coffee from Hasbean might be viable, and it might offer some niche appeal as a product which will be different from anything you are likely to be able to source locally (e.g. italian coffee is generally more darkly roasted and the cost often reduced by adding cheaper robusta beans to the blend to produce a coffee which is specifically targeted at italian tastes for espresso coffee). Hasbean's roasts will suit brewed coffee much better than anything you are likely to be able to buy in Italy for example.

Taking the niche/unique selling point thing a bit further, Hasbean offer subscription coffee to their domestic customers. The particular coffee they send each week changes, and is mostly single estate. That allows customers to experience lots of different coffees, and doubtless enables Hasbean to better manage its stock, and hence the subscription prices are generally very good.

For a well established coffee shop serving espresso coffee, it would not be practical or acceptable to have the type of coffee change each week. Customers will be used to - and expect - the same coffee each time.

However, for a new start up cafe which specialised in brewed coffee, changing the coffee each week might work very well and add a novelty factor for customers and give them an extra reason to come back ('to try next week's coffee'), i.e. a little bit like guest beers.

If I were in your shoes, I would start by seeing if anyone amongst the volunteers had a coffee grinder, and then I would arrange for the lead volunteers to meet once a week to make and taste coffee (and decide if and when what you are making is good enough to sell). I would buy a 1 or 3 month subscription from Hasbean for the coffee tasting, and I would also search ebay for a good used Mahlkonig EK43 (if the whole thing is unsuccessful, you should be able to re-sell it with little loss).

If after a few months your own tasting and honest feedback from friends told you that the coffee you were making was very good, then you could be a lot more confident about opening the cafe, and you could ask Hasbean if they would ship subscription coffee (or a particular one of their beans if you preferred) to you in bulk each week or fortnight.

[Cyril Haearn]

Might be better to get the coffee direct from the country of production instead of supporting a business in the UK (food miles!)

[Canuk]

If you do that, get some decent pourover sets too, because IMO you might as well serve capsule coffee as the thin-yet-sludgey disappointments served in most cafe cafetieres.

There are pros and cons to each of the various methods for brewed coffee, not only in terms of the taste of the product but also the practicality in a cafe setting. One of my reasons for suggesting cafetieres is that you effectively outsource part of the process to the customer, leaving them to press the plunger and pour it out, which also involves them in the process of producing the drink (like, say, filling your own tortillas or spring rolls in a restaurant, which is part of the whole experience of the meal).

The reason for the sludgey nature of most caferiere coffee and the fact that it's ususually not considered the best of the brewed coffee methods, is partly down to the grinders. Most grinders, including those manufactured for commercial use to make espresso, tend to produce a wide range of particle sizes, including a significant percentage of fines. Those fines produce the sludge in non-paper filter coffee and also negatively affect the taste because their large ratio of surface area to volume results in over-extraction. In other words, by the end of the 4 minute optimum period for the extracting flavour from the larger particles of ground coffee bean, a lot of flavours that you don't want will also have been extracted from the fines.

The Mahlkonig EK43 grinder I mentioned is reckoned to be the best grinder for brewed coffee because it produces the most uniform particle sizes with the minimum of fines (and there are number of top end baristas who do also use it for espresso in their shops). Hence my suggesting it: it's no good offering coffee that customers can and do make as well or better themselves at home - you need to make significantly bettter coffee, and you will need a better grinder, better beans and better technique to achieve that.

I would suggest you stick with just one method, whether pourover, Aeropress, Chemex or cafetiere, and make sure that you are very good and consistant with it.

I said it probably would not be viable to import your coffee from the UK, but checking Hasbean's website I see they do ship internationally, and one of their commercial customers is a high end coffee shop in Paris, Telescope (and in Google photographs, you see they serve Aeropress in addition to espresso, and have a Mahlkonig EK43).

So buying coffee from Hasbean might be viable, and it might offer some niche appeal as a product which will be different from anything you are likely to be able to source locally (e.g. italian coffee is generally more darkly roasted and the cost often reduced by adding cheaper robusta beans to the blend to produce a coffee which is specifically targeted at italian tastes for espresso coffee). Hasbean's roasts will suit brewed coffee much better than anything you are likely to be able to buy in Italy for example.

Taking the niche/unique selling point thing a bit further, Hasbean offer subscription coffee to their domestic customers. The particular coffee they send each week changes, and is mostly single estate. That allows customers to experience lots of different coffees, and doubtless enables Hasbean to better manage its stock, and hence the subscription prices are generally very good.

For a well established coffee shop serving espresso coffee, it would not be practical or acceptable to have the type of coffee change each week. Customers will be used to - and expect - the same coffee each time.

However, for a new start up cafe which specialised in brewed coffee, changing the coffee each week might work very well and add a novelty factor for customers and give them an extra reason to come back ('to try next week's coffee'), i.e. a little bit like guest beers.

If I were in your shoes, I would start by seeing if anyone amongst the volunteers had a coffee grinder, and then I would arrange for the lead volunteers to meet once a week to make and taste coffee (and decide if and when what you are making is good enough to sell). I would buy a 1 or 3 month subscription from Hasbean for the coffee tasting, and I would also search ebay for a good used Mahlkonig EK43 (if the whole thing is unsuccessful, you should be able to re-sell it with little loss).

If after a few months your own tasting and honest feedback from friends told you that the coffee you were making was very good, then you could be a lot more confident about opening the cafe, and you could ask Hasbean if they would ship subscription coffee (or a particular one of their beans if you preferred) to you in bulk each week or fortnight.

Thats very useful info, thank you for that. We had a roast bean supplier from just outside Milan, but I've tasted their coffee a few times now and I'm not at all convinced. Fortunately the only other cafe in town sells Lavazza coffee which is the same sludge you find in the likes of Wetherspoons, so I reckon we could easily wipe the floor with them. Will definitely contact Hasbean this week as we need to get the ball rolling and open for business in April latest.

The project is fully funded for one year, which is a godsend, but after that I reckon its down to quality food and coffee to retain customers. I'd be up for organising wine tours by bike from the cafe, as I'm quite well connected with the local producers, and its a lovely day out and the cost to the project is zero. Wine tours are very popular here, but they are mainly conducted from behind polarised glass in a 7 seater which I think an absolute waste of a day. What think you?