Food service is a highly competitive business environment, and the coffee shop industry is no exception. Keeping up with demand while maintaining a high standard of service, safety, and customer engagement is a balancing act high-volume café owners need to nail. 

Commercial cold brew coffee makers offer busy coffee operators much-needed respite – they are designed to optimise workflows and cut down on labour costs and overheads while improving quality and safety. 

Not only do they prepare cold brew more quickly – slotting seamlessly into day-to-day cafe operations – but they also produce cold brew more cheaply and to a more consistent standard. Many cafe owners would be forgiven for choosing not to sell cold brew because of the arduous process traditional brewing entails.

However, with commercial cold brew coffee makers, there is no longer a trade-off between service speed and menu variety: these machines make serving cold brew a straightforward and commercially beneficial undertaking. 

We spoke to Ben Rowe, director at Harmony Coffee, to learn more. 

How important is it to serve cold brew?

The cold brew coffee segment is among the fastest growing within the global coffee sector. In early 2024, Fortune Business Insights valued the global cold brew market at $3.16 billion and predicted a further 22.67% year-on-year growth to reach $16.22 billion by 2032. 

Cold brew coffee growth is outstripping specialty coffee, ready-to-drink coffee, and plant-based dairy alternatives, all strong growth areas in their own right. 

The performance can be attributed to a few key factors. Chiefly, cold brew coffee benefits from the development of the trends mentioned above. It is well suited to the RTD format, it can be customised and stratified to incorporate specialty coffee bases, and it pairs well with both dairy and non-dairy alternatives. 

“As specialty coffee grows, so too will cold brew as a matter of calculus,” says Ben. 

“I think that this rate of purchasing could be accelerated with a focus on the quality market. If we can make a delicious-tasting cold brew that can rival some of the best-tasting filter coffees out there, then it stands to reason that the product itself will gain more popularity, and the demand will increase.”

Moreover, cold brew is widely perceived as a healthier alternative to other coffee-based beverage options. Health and wellness trends have grown significantly over the past five years, led by younger generations who are more interested in the health benefits of the products they consume. 

Thanks to naturally lower acidity and bitterness, a more mellow flavour profile, and natural sweetness, cold brew coffee can be enjoyed without added sweeteners, proving a hit with Millennial and Gen Z shoppers. 

As these consumers’ purchasing power increases, the cold coffee category will only increase—last year, Starbucks reported that hot coffee contributed just 25% of its beverage sales. Serving cold brew now seems a non-negotiable. 

What are the practical challenges of serving cold brew? 

For a high-volume café, brewing cold brew without a commercial machine to help can be disruptive on several fronts. 

The main challenges are quantity and timing. Brewing cold brew in large batches requires more extensive facilities and dedicated staff, both of which are typically in short supply for hospitality operators, especially cafés, which deal with high rental rates and labour costs.  

Moreover, traditional cold brewing takes at least twelve hours and, more commonly, up to 24 hours. This means that a café owner or manager needs to predict upcoming demand accurately or risk wasting excess cold brew or disappointing customers with insufficient stock. 

For high-volume cafés, the chances of incorrect forecasting increase, and cold brew can become a costly enterprise across stock control, labour allocation, and brand reputation. 

“Absolutely brewing cold brew presents challenges for cafes that manufacture their own,” confirms Ben.

“It’s slow, has a short lifespan and a large batch size. If one runs out of cold brew during the day, it’s not as simple as just whipping up another quick batch.”

Cold brew has a short shelf life when refrigerated – about five days – and even shorter when stored ambiently. Plus, quality begins to decline the longer your batch is exposed to air and sunlight, and the risk of contamination or spoiling increases.

“It’s hard to strike a balance between making too much cold brew and wasting your ingredients or making too little cold brew and having a higher cost per unit,” adds Ben.

How can commercial cold brew coffee makers help?

Commercial cold brew coffee makers represent a silver bullet to the challenges described above. 

Firstly, equipment like the Baby Hardtank or Hardtank 20 commercial cold brew coffee makers brew cold brew batches in less than an hour, using patented recirculation technology that consistently moves water across the coffee grounds, speeding up extraction. 

This methodology also increases yield, quality, and consistency in the final product, brewing to a ready-to-drink total dissolved solids (TDS) level with less coffee required per batch.

“If you can produce really great cold brew consistently via automation, you can greatly reduce the potential for human error,” says Ben. 

By delivering faster, more consistent, and higher quality cold brew, commercial cold brew coffee makers can help high-volume cafes behave more flexibly, respond to demand dynamically, and reduce waste and customer disappointment. 

“The main advantage of automating, I can see, is that it reduces the labour cost per unit,” he adds.

“If it takes 15 minutes of work to prepare manual cold brew versus five minutes to automate that same product, then you’re saving ten minutes of staff labour per batch, which can be committed to other tasks. If you make 250 brews through the summer months, year-on-year, that’s a lot of time saved.”

From a cost perspective, both the Baby Hardtank and Hardtank 20 produce cold brew portions at lower costs, thanks to their greater yield capabilities. A Baby Hardtank can produce 200 ml portions for just 0.45 EUR, while the average portion via the traditional method costs almost 0.83 EUR. (You can expect to pay off either model within two months).

There are also savings to be had on labour. Integrated user-friendly technology means recipes can be set ahead of service and managed at the touch of a button. Automated cleaning systems and drainage are built-in to speed up service and improve hygiene. 

Instead of hands-on filtering and storage processes, Hardtank commercial cold brew machines dispense directly to an integrated reservoir for optimised storage conditions, reducing the risk of cross-contamination or oxidisation. 

Staff are freed up to focus on other business-critical tasks, such as interacting with customers to enhance the café experience or behind-the-counter processes that have yet to be automated. 

For smaller cafés, the Baby Hardtank commercial cold brew coffee maker is a perfect countertop solution. Not only is it compact – just 30 cm x 30 cm – but its design aesthetic is award-winning and offers a new element of customer experience. It can pump out up to 250 200 ml cold brew portions per day.

For larger businesses, the Hardtank 20 commercial cold brew coffee maker can consistently yield 1,000+ cold brew portions per day and can be fitted with two nitrogen draught taps for convenient nitro coffee dispensing. 

Both machines have been built with food-grade stainless steel materials for the highest hygiene standards, upholding Hardtank’s commitment to BRCGS health and safety values. 

To source your own commercial cold brew coffee maker, visit our website or get in touch with the team. 

If you missed our latest cold brew masterclass, you can still catch a recording here!

Commercial cold brew coffee maker