Let’s meet at the Blank Street Coffee by Tottenham Court Road. Which one? The brand has two within a minute of the station. Oh wait, now you say it, they’re everywhere. Blank Street Coffee, originally from Brooklyn, was launched in the wake of the pandemic in 2020. Fast-forward a year, and it had raised $67m from investors including Left Lane Capital, HOF Capital, General Catalyst and Tiger Global. Blank Street Coffee’s pitch? Faster, cheaper coffee than the average high street brand, and packaged up like a trendy independent.

By 2022, it had opened internationally, in Fitzrovia, and begun a monopoly-style acquisition across the city. Today, a mere four years later, the company has 87 sites spread across London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, New York, Boston and Washington DC. Blank Street Coffee has been averaging 12 site openings per year in the UK alone, snapping up prime sites in record time. 

I first visited one of its sites in King’s Cross, where it is conveniently located right by the station. At that point, I had noticed one or two shops from the outside but thought of it as a small boutique outfit. Going in, I was surprised at the conveyer belt experience and transactional service, but appreciative of the speed since I was in a rush. The coffee itself was so-so, not burnt or overly bitter, and the right amount of caffeine kick for my sensitive tastes. It doesn’t replace my local coffee visits, which give me more of a sense of community, indulgence and a bit of coffee alchemy. Blank Street Coffee is for a different occasion entirely – far more functional, a lot quicker and cheaper too. 

Its rapid growth is built on a foundation of speed, efficiency and distinctive pistachio-green branding. Alongside a number of other operators, including Leon and Roasting Plant, Blank Street Coffee’s speed is powered by Eversys automated espresso machines. A 2-Group retails around £30,000 and allows baristas to brew premium coffee or steam milk at the push of a button, reducing wait times and eliminating the need for highly trained staff. Blank Street Coffee also offers a selection of pre-mixed drinks such as cherry cold brew lattes, and incentivises pre-orders via its app, speeding service up even further. The drinks menu is focused and food minimal, making the proposition easy to understand and quick to order from. Simplicity that saves time, makes training easier and allows for superior cost control that more complex offers. 

The pricing strategy is somewhere between the Starbucks and Prets of this world, while offering two sizes rather than three at the former and one at the latter. Having done a quick tally at my local, it is pretty evenly split between those going for small or large, but the small price of £3.50 for a latte/flat white/cappuccino looks more reasonable next to the £3.90 large. 

It's easy to be snobbish about the coffee – see Eater article “The Oppressive Blah-ness of the Blank Street Coffee Chain” – and there’s certainly something special about a perfectly crafted cup made by human hands. But the truth is, the UK market is just as addicted to milk as it is to coffee, and the milky coffees are, well, milky. As Blank Street Coffee co-founder Vinay Menda put it: “We don’t need to be the most amazing cup of coffee you’ve ever had. Instead, we want to be the really good cup coffee that you drink twice a day, every day.”

For many customers, that’s enough. Offer consistency, speed, convenience and attractive design, and they are happy. As long as that’s the case, Blank Street Coffee will continue to rise – perhaps even to a corner near you.

When the shuttered Four Sisters pub reopened as The Pocket in Islington with an expansive beer list, I made the short tube trip south for a visit during its opening week. During this early evening jaunt when the pub was particularly quiet, I enquired how things were going to the couple of 20-something’s serving behind the bar, which extended into a general chat about pubs and beer.

 

These were safe reference points, but things went amiss when I mentioned that I had once interviewed Giles Coren in a pub in Kentish Town. They had no idea who he was, even with my prods of saying he’s The Times’ restaurant critic who has appeared on TV in a series with Sue Perkins. “Sue who?” they asked. I tried the fact he has a sister Victoria, who is also on TV and is married to a comedian. They managed to recall that she fronts a quiz show. Needless to say, I didn’t mention Giles’ late father, the writer Alan.

 

The issue of reference points can be a hazard in hospitality businesses because while the customer gets older, the front-of-house team stay perennially young – invariably in that sub-30-year-old age grouping. Conversations have to be steered down particular paths. It has therefore been refreshing on early weekday visits to my local the Fuller’s-owned Great Northern Railway Tavern, to occasionally be served by a man who, to my calculation, is well over 50 years old.

 

He has explained that he prefers to work early evening hours on quieter nights of the week, when there is less noise in the pub, which enables him to more clearly hear customer orders over the bar. Despite such hurdles, his presence is very much a positive in the pub, because it helps the team better mirror the broad range of customers it serves. 

 

Fuller’s is among a growing band of hospitality companies tapping into the older workforce. Fuller’s uses an over-50s digital community, Rest Less, to help it recruit from a demographic that has helped the company push-up its over-50s mix to 12% of its total workforce. Fuller’s is not alone is seeing this figure rise because there has been a 10% increase in older workers – baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 – returning to casual work in the hospitality industry, according to research from Employment Hero.

 

This makes the sector the third highest employer of over-50s after finance and insurance, which is a positive trend because hospitality, along with retail, has been suffering major challenges recruiting people into the sector. My wife joined Fortnum & Mason six months ago on a part-time basis, and a reasonably flexible arrangement on the days she works. 

 

Like other older workers, she has the ability to accommodate late rota changes that could be more of an issue for younger employees with other commitments, such as a young family or studying. Another advantage for businesses is the improved retention rates they enjoy with older employees who are far less willing to shift to another employer on a whim, and they are also less likely to have the transient living arrangements of youngsters and students. 

 

A further upside to older workers is their ability to mentor younger members of a team as they invariably bring experience and other life skills to bear. Although relatively new to Fortnum & Mason, my wife has already undertaken a couple of presentations to the rest of the team, calling on skills from previous roles. Such activities can be challenging for younger employees, who also find engaging with customers a tough ask – whether that be on the shop floor or in restaurant and bar environments. To have help on tap from older team members massively contributes to the smoother running of organisations. 

 

Simon Wilkinson, board director at Evolv Collection and TGI Fridays, encapsulates these upsides when he says: “I’m always a fan of employing older people because, as a general rule, they turn up, are reliable, diligent and have engaging personalities.” 

 

Let’s hope the hospitality industry will continue to embrace the older worker cohort because there are clearly major upsides to be enjoyed by all parties, and it will also make my life significantly easier when chatting to bar staff who might just know all the members of the Coren family.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why smaller brands and even independents are looking at implementing Power BI or other visualisation tools in their businesses. It’s not something we’ve really seen before these past two or so years. Previously, these platforms were seen as the purview of big enterprises. Not anymore.

 

But actually, it makes a lot of sense. There are two simple truths: margins in restaurants have never been tighter, and restaurants are generating more data than ever before. With costs on the up, understanding where efficiencies could be made is now more important than ever. 

 

That then leads to a whole lot of Excel spreadsheets floating around in the ether. But there’s only so much you can do with spreadsheets, and when that becomes too time-consuming, confusing and difficult to handle, looking for a more automated solution is obvious.

 

I myself know what it’s like to be desperate to get your hands on data. When I was running Hummus Bros, a chain of restaurants in London with six locations, it felt like I was constantly chasing insight. I knew I was generating a ton of data, but I couldn’t get my hands on it quickly enough to actually use it to make decisions. 

 

In fact, it frustrated me so much that I used my background in computer science to try and build some sort of solution for my business. Still, despite my background and knowledge, I was still fighting to make it work. When I was looking to connect to application programming interfaces, my software providers simply said no, they wouldn’t provide them to me. 

 

Ultimately, it was that frustration that led to the founding of Tenzo. But, over the last ten years, attitudes toward data in the hospitality industry have fundamentally shifted. After the pandemic, channels increased and ways of doing business changed, so restaurants have become much more technology-forward. Now, everyone wants access to their data. 

 

That has translated to more and more businesses looking to build out reporting suites with advanced visualisation tools. Drilling into data – seeing top-selling dishes not only by month but by day of the week or by daypart, sales and labour mix side by side, menu profitability analysis – could make a tangible difference to any business. 

 

There are so many areas in hospitality businesses that could be improved by getting a handle on the data, but that in itself creates a lot of decision paralysis. So, how would I go about setting up a business intelligence tool in a business today?

 

I see businesses go down the road of building out their own reporting suites because there’s a fixation on getting everything into one platform. From super granular sales, labour and inventory, to accounting platforms, task management, reservations, delivery and loyalty – they want it all. Once they have that, they’ll be able to assess what needs doing. 

 

But that often leads to getting stuck at the first hurdle. Without a data engineering background, getting into the intricacies of setting up data warehouses, extracting data, transforming and loading it into a visualisation tool can soon sound like complete gibberish. I’ve watched businesses try for years just to get to a point where they feel they’ve got all the sources they need.

 

My advice to any business looking at implementing a business intelligence platform is to start small. Just look at sales to begin with. Focus on getting the level of granularity you want from one data source. This will take significantly less time and will get you using your newfound insights much more quickly. Plus, as it’s faster to roll out, you’ll keep team enthusiasm throughout. 

 

You’ll also learn what is helpful and what’s not. If you don’t start using your business intelligence platform until everything is connected, you’ll inevitably find that you wish you had set it up slightly differently. But by then, making changes to the infrastructure will take even more time and money. Your team won’t engage with the insights it does generate, and you’ll be back at square one. 

 

If you can get one source set up, start to think about the next one. Think about your users and the desired outcomes before you start building. If you want your operations team to use the insights to make changes, then you need to have as real-time data as possible. If you want marketing to be able to look at how their campaigns affected sales, you’ll want to prioritise building in ads reporting or web analytics platforms. 

 

If you want your general managers and on-the-floor team to use data to make decisions, think about the device you make this available on. If they need to open a laptop to consult it, then the likelihood is it won’t get looked at regularly enough. 

 

There’s nothing worse than putting time and resources into something that ultimately no one uses, so think through your change management plan. How will you get this platform embedded into daily processes?

 

It’s not a quick journey, but it is one worth going on. Having access to data insights can be a game-changer for hospitality businesses facing today’s challenges.