Ground down by the price of your £2.50 Patisserie Valerie and other high street cappuccinos?

Issues both financial, and now legal at at Patisserie Valerie (see Finance Chief arrested) highlight the value of examining one of the fundamentals of on-premise provision of food and drink...

Given that the humble £2.50 cappuccino has fallen out of favour, coffee connoisseurs apparently demand more than a standard caffeine fix to help them through the day, at a price!

The Daily Mail has listed sources like The Connaught in Mayfair (£7.50 for any cup of coffee) and Claridge’s (up to £20 for a filter coffee for two people), apart from the ultimate deep-pocket source like The Wellesley hotel in Knightsbridge serving Wild Kopi Luwak coffee, at £45 a cup.

In other words, connoisseurs trying DIY @ 9p/cup vs Wild Kopi Luwak coffee, at £45 a cup, can appreciate the threat to food service... 

But the real issue has to be the contrast between High Street coffee at £2.50 a cup compared with home filtered at 9p a cup.

In other words, far from seeing up market varieties as a threat, consumers adopting a DIY approach might be more dangerous…

In fact, with street coffee priced at upwards of £2.50 a cup, I have reverted to grinding and filtering best quality French coffee beans, purchased from Waitrose at £2.60 per 227g bag. Each bag yields 5 x 6 cups, effectively costing me 9p a cup. If I could buy wholesale, the price would be no more than £2/bag...

OK, the ambience is worth something, but 30x 'domestic rates'...?

In fact, when you think about it, apart from the bill, most people's memory of a great restaurant meal is coloured by the final course, a cup of coffee. Yet, even at these mark-ups, some restaurants risk diner alienation by skimping on the coffee, thereby triggering the manual 'tell a friend' mechanism' whereby, if you please a customer, they tell one friend, disappoint them and they tell ten. Add social networking muscle, and the reach is infinitesimal.....

Incidentally, for those NAMs that prefer tea, how about one tailored to cope with the pressures of the NAM day-job...  (Thanks Gerry)

A NAM insight from NamNews