"Can someone come and show the new staff?"
A café you supply has had three new baristas since spring. The manager messages to ask if someone can come over and go through dialling in again. The head roaster says yes, then spends a week trying to find a time that suits the café, the roastery and the barista rota. Meanwhile a customer posts a photo of a sour flat white with your coffee named on the chalkboard.
Across all your wholesale accounts, training is promised freely at the start and then happens whenever someone pushes for it.
Training has no owner and no record
Training is treated as a favour rather than a service, so nothing is recorded. You do not know which baristas at which café have been trained, on which coffee, or when. When staff turn over, which in cafés is constant, the knowledge walks out the door, and nobody at the roastery is told.
- Sessions are arranged by text or WhatsApp with no calendar.
- Nobody records who attended or what was covered.
- New coffees are rolled out to cafés without any training.
- Only one or two people at the roastery can deliver training.
- Cafés at your own training space and on site are booked differently.
What untrained staff cost you
Your coffee is judged in the cup, and the cup is made by someone you did not train. Inconsistent extraction at a café reflects on your brand and makes the café more likely to blame the coffee and look at other roasters. Unplanned training also takes the head roaster off the roaster at short notice, which pushes production around. And because none of it is recorded, you cannot see which accounts are getting a lot of support and which are getting none.
A training system for your cafés
- A booking page for your café accounts, showing session types such as espresso basics, dialling in, milk and latte art, and new coffee launch, with available slots at your training space or on site.
- Slots come from the calendars of the people who can train, so a booking does not collide with a roast day.
- Each booking records the café and the baristas attending, and the trainer ticks off what was covered.
- Trained staff are held against the café account, with the date and the coffee they were trained on.
- When a café's order changes to a new coffee or you launch a new espresso, the café is prompted to book a session.
- Café managers can see their own team's training record and send new starters to book directly.
| Part | What it replaces |
|---|---|
| Booking page | Texts to find a time |
| Trainer calendars | Guessing who is free |
| Attendance and topics | No record at all |
| Prompts on new coffee | Remembering to offer training |
| Café view | Manager asking what their staff have done |
What your wholesale support looks like afterwards
Training becomes a visible part of the wholesale service. Cafés book what they need without a chain of messages. Your trainers plan around roast days. When a café complains about the coffee, you can check whether its current baristas have ever been trained on it before assuming the roast is at fault. And you can see which accounts use a lot of support, which feeds into pricing and account reviews.
Recognise your training set up?
- Barista training is arranged by text.
- You do not know which café staff have been trained.
- New coffees reach cafés without a training session.
- The head roaster is regularly pulled off roasting to train.
- Café quality varies a lot between accounts.