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Independent cafes with a barista on every shift usually get the most from a traditional espresso machine, because grind, dose and milk texture are worth controlling by hand when somebody is there to control them. Offices are the opposite case. Whoever makes the coffee changes hour by hour, nobody is paid to dial in a grinder, and a one-touch bean to cup machine that hands the same flat white to the finance director and the courier is worth more than any amount of manual control.

Hotels often need two answers at once: espresso-based drinks at the bar, and volume brewed coffee for a breakfast service that peaks hard and then stops, which is exactly what a bulk filter brewer is built for. Forecourts, convenience stores and garden centres are buying a margin line rather than a coffee bar, so a self-serve coffee to go station or an unattended vending machine earns its place on cup price and reliability, and on what each takeaway cup actually returns.

Gyms, leisure sites and visitor attractions tend to want cold drinks alongside the coffee, because hot sales dip in the weeks the site is busiest. Milkshakes and slush cover that gap from the same counter. We supply all of them across the UK, and if none of those descriptions quite fits your site, tell us what does.

Commercial coffee equipment is built to run for years rather than seasons, so a properly checked ex-demo or refurbished machine will often out-perform a brand new model from the class below at the same money. That is a strong argument when the budget is fixed and the site is busy, and it is how a two-group machine ends up in a cafe that was quoted for a compact one.

What makes it work is knowing precisely what you are buying. Ask what work has been carried out, and by whom. Ask what is included in the price: grinder, filtration, cups, delivery. Ask how the machine spent its previous life, because a demonstrator that sat on a dealer’s counter and a unit pulled out of a motorway services have had very different weeks. Our guide to what ex-demo and refurbished actually mean sets out the questions worth asking before you commit.

Buy new when you need one specific model, a particular milk system, or a machine that will run at capacity all day every day, and when availability matters more than price, because used stock changes week to week as units come and go. Either way the running costs are identical: water treatment and a maintenance schedule that is actually kept decide how long a machine lasts far more than its age on delivery day.

A venue selling two hundred drinks spread evenly across a long day asks very little of its equipment. A venue selling eighty of them inside a forty-minute breakfast window asks a great deal. Peak throughput is the figure that sizes the machine. The daily total mostly tells you what you will spend on beans.

Everything else follows from that number. Boiler capacity and recovery time decide whether the fifteenth drink is as good as the first. Hopper size decides how often somebody is topping up mid-rush. On bean to cup, milk fridge and waste bin capacity set how long the machine runs before it needs attention. On traditional espresso, group head count and grinder throughput are the real ceiling.

Undersizing shows up as queues, thin milk and a boiler that never gets the chance to recover. Oversizing shows up on the invoice, and in a machine that idles for six hours a day when the money would have done more good spent on filtration or a better grinder.

Our sizing guide works through capacity bands and a worked example, and the questions we are asked most cover the rest. If you would rather not do it on paper, send us your peak hour and we will size it with you.