Training your cafés' baristas
Your coffee is judged on a machine you have never used, by someone who started three weeks ago, at 8:20 on a Friday. Everything you did at the roastery is decided in that twenty seconds. Training is not a favour you do for accounts; it is the last part of your own process, carried out in somebody else's building.
Published 18 September 2026
Short answer. Thirty minutes on the first delivery, ninety minutes twice a year, and a laminated card by the grinder that outlives everyone you train. Teach the recipe, which way to move the grinder, milk, cleaning, and when to ring you. Include it above a volume you set and charge below it. Two sessions a year cost about €0.44 a kilo on a normal account, which is less than half of what a €1 discount costs.
Why this is a retention problem
Accounts rarely announce that they are leaving because the coffee got worse. What happens is quieter. The head barista who could taste a shot and move the grinder leaves in March. The person who replaces them was shown the buttons by someone who was also new. By June the espresso is running long and nobody has noticed, the owner starts hearing that the coffee is bitter, and by September they are tasting samples from somebody else.
None of that is a coffee problem and all of it lands on you. Hospitality turns staff over faster than almost any trade, which means the useful question is not "have we trained this account" but "has anyone started since we were last in". Ask it on every visit. It is the single highest-value question in this guide.
It also explains why the laminated card matters more than the session. The session trains a person, and people leave. The card, the video and the cleaning schedule train the bar, and the bar stays.
What to teach, and what to leave out
Five things. Resist the rest, however interesting it is to you.
- The recipe, as numbers
- Dose in, yield out, seconds, water temperature, for each coffee they buy. Written down, not explained. "18 g in, 40 g out, 28–32 seconds" is a thing a new hire can follow on their second shift.
- Which way to move the grinder
- Not why, which way. Running fast and thin means finer; choking and dripping means coarser; adjust a little, purge, check. If a bar learns one thing from you, this is the one that recovers a Saturday.
- Milk
- Texture and temperature for the two drinks they actually sell most. Most customers of most cafés only ever meet your coffee through milk, and a scalded flat white makes a good espresso irrelevant.
- Cleaning, as a schedule
- Backflush daily, baskets and screens weekly, grinder hopper and chute weekly, burr check quarterly. A dirty group tastes exactly like a coffee that has gone stale, which is why it gets blamed on you.
- When to ring you
- Give permission explicitly. "If two shots in a row are wrong and moving the grinder has not fixed it, ring me, that is what the number is for." Most bars would rather serve a bad coffee than bother a supplier.
The first thirty minutes
On the first delivery, before the account has any habits. Be there in person — this is the visit that decides whether they think of you as a supplier or as part of their operation.
- Dial the espresso in on their machine with their water and their milk, with whoever is on bar doing the grinding.
- Write the numbers on the card in pen while they watch, and stick it where the grinder is, not in a folder.
- Pull one deliberately bad shot and one good one, and taste both together, so "wrong" has a reference.
- Photograph the grinder setting and the card, and put both on the account so you can tell them next time what it was.
- Leave your mobile number written on the card itself.
The rest of the first month — the week-one call, the day-thirty review — is in onboarding a new wholesale café.
A ninety-minute session
Run it before opening or on a quiet afternoon, never during service. Two or three people, not the whole team; the ones you train become the ones who train the next hire.
| Time | What you do | Why it is in there |
|---|---|---|
| 0–10 min | Taste what they are serving now | Establishes the problem together rather than being told about it |
| 10–30 min | Dial in each coffee, them on the machine, you watching | Their hands, their timings. A demonstration teaches nobody |
| 30–45 min | Break it on purpose: coarse, fine, stale, cold cup | So a bad shot is recognised and fixed, not served |
| 45–70 min | Milk: texture, temperature, the two drinks they sell most | This is where most of their customers meet your coffee |
| 70–80 min | Cleaning walkthrough, with the schedule left behind | Half of taste complaints are a dirty group or an old grinder hopper |
| 80–90 min | Recipe cards up, numbers written on, who to ring | The part that is still there in six months |
Bring your own scales, a thermometer and a cleaning kit. Turning up and finding the café has no working scales is the most common way a training session becomes a shopping trip.
The card that stays behind
One per coffee, laminated or printed on card, taped where the grinder is. This is the artefact that survives the staff who leave.
Recipe card
[ROASTERY] · HOUSE ESPRESSO Roasted [Mondays and Wednesdays] Dose 18 g Yield 40 g Time 28–32 s Water 93 °C Grind started at [4.2] on [22 Sept] Running too fast / thin / sour → grind FINER, a little Dripping / choking / bitter → grind COARSER, a little Adjust, purge two shots, taste again Milk: [60] °C, glossy, no big bubbles Daily backflush, clean baskets, wipe the grinder chute Weekly soak baskets and screens, empty and wipe the hopper Quarterly burr check — we do this, just ask Two bad shots in a row and grinding didn't fix it? Ring [name] on [mobile]. Any time we're open. That's the job.
What it costs, and what it saves
Put your own numbers in. The default is two sessions a year on an 8 kg a week account.
Break-even is the training cost as a share of a year's gross profit on the account: how much the chance of losing it has to fall, in a year, for the training to have paid. Hospitality staff turnover alone clears that bar comfortably.
The comparison in the middle of that output is the one worth keeping. Two proper training sessions cost less than half of what a €1 a kilo discount costs on the same account, and unlike the discount they are visible, memorable and impossible for a cheaper roaster to copy remotely. That is the whole case made in competing with a cheaper roaster, with numbers attached.
Charging for it
Free for everyone sounds generous and quietly punishes you: the smallest accounts have the highest turnover and ask the most often. A structure that holds up:
- The first dial-in is always included, whatever the size. It is part of the sale, not a service.
- Included above a volume you name — say two sessions a year over 5 kg a week — and put that on your wholesale page, because it is a genuine reason to choose you.
- A half-day rate below it, waived once for a new account. Publishing a rate does something useful even when you rarely charge it: it tells the café what they are being given.
- Always charged: training for a business that is not your customer, and the third visit in a year to fix the same thing, which is a grinder conversation rather than a training one.
The parts that scale
You cannot be in sixteen cafés every time somebody new starts. Three things cover the gap.
- A ninety-second video per coffee. Filmed on a phone, on a normal bar: the recipe, the grind adjustment, one bad shot and one good one. Send the link when an account mentions a new hire. It is the cheapest thing in this guide and the most used.
- A photo protocol. Tell bars exactly what to send when something is wrong: the dose, the yield, the time, the grind setting and a photo of the puck. Four numbers and a picture solves most problems in one message and stops the "it tastes weird" thread.
- A standing offer, repeated. "Twenty minutes with anyone new, any time, just ask." Say it on every visit, because the person who heard it last year has left.
When it is not the barista
Before teaching anyone anything, rule out the three things that cause most complaints about coffee.
- Burrs. Espresso burrs have a life measured in tonnes, not years. A grinder that will not hold a setting or produces an inconsistent shot on a clean machine is usually due, and no amount of technique fixes it.
- Water. Untreated or wrongly treated water changes how your coffee tastes and destroys machines slowly. An exhausted filter cartridge is a cheap fix for an expensive-sounding problem — see selling equipment to your cafés.
- Cleaning. A group that has not been backflushed for a month tastes like old coffee, because that is what it is.
Say all of this the same way you would want to hear it. "Let's rule out the machine before we look at anything else" is a sentence that keeps a café on your side; any version that starts with their staff does not.
Questions roasters ask
- Should a coffee roaster train its wholesale cafés' baristas?
- Yes, and mostly for selfish reasons. Your coffee is judged on a machine you do not own by a person you did not hire, and the single largest cause of an account deciding your coffee got worse is that the barista who could dial it in has left. Training is the cheapest insurance you can buy against that: on an 8 kg a week account, two sessions a year cost about €0.44 per kilo sold.
- What should barista training for a wholesale account cover?
- Five things and no more: the recipe for each coffee, which way to move the grinder and when, milk texture, the cleaning schedule, and when to ring you instead of guessing. Anything about extraction theory is for the people who ask. The goal is a bar that can recover from a bad shot without calling anyone.
- Should a roastery charge for barista training?
- Include it for accounts above a volume you set, and charge for it below that. Free training for everyone rewards the smallest accounts with the most turnover. A workable line is free for accounts over about 5 kg a week and a half-day rate for anyone else, waived on the first session of a new account.
- How long should a barista training session be?
- Ninety minutes for a standard session, and thirty for the dial-in on the first delivery. Longer than two hours and people stop absorbing it, and no café can spare three staff for a morning. Two short sessions six months apart beat one long one.
- How do you train a café that keeps hiring new staff?
- Stop trying to train people and start training the bar. A laminated recipe card by the grinder, a ninety-second video per coffee they can send a new hire, and a standing offer to spend twenty minutes with anyone new will outlast any individual. Ask on every visit whether anyone has started since you were last in.
- What if the problem is the grinder or the water, not the barista?
- Say so early and plainly, because it usually is. Stale burrs, a grinder that cannot hold a setting, and untreated water cause more complaints about coffee than technique does. Diagnosing it is part of the job, and it is a much better conversation than one where you imply their staff cannot make coffee.
Where Order Book fits
What you did on a visit belongs on the account, not in your memory. Order Book keeps notes and the Activity record per client, so the grind setting you wrote down in March, the date of the last session and who was trained are on the client's page when a complaint arrives in September — which is usually enough to work out what changed.
Drift detection does the other half. An account whose barista left and whose coffee has quietly got worse does not ring you; it orders a little later and a little less, and turns up on your Monday call list. A training visit is often the right answer to a drifting account, and it is a great deal cheaper than the discount you would otherwise be asked for.
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