As a café or cof­fee shop owner, one of the eas­i­est ways to make an impres­sion on your cus­tomers is through the cup you serve them. The cup is the piece of your café they will take away with them, the object they will have the most inter­ac­tion with, and con­se­quently, your great­est brand­ing oppor­tu­nity. Additionally, the sheer num­ber of cups a typ­i­cal café and cof­fee shop uses in a sin­gle day illus­trates how large a finan­cial impact your choice of cup can have on your busi­ness. However, choos­ing which cup you will carry can be con­fus­ing. Should you choose new or recy­cled mate­r­ial? Sleeves that are built in, or sep­a­rate? Colorful designs or plain white paper? Should you pay extra to imprint your logo? Offer reusable mugs for in-house cus­tomers? Carry to-go mugs the cus­tomer can bring back again and again? Admittedly, mak­ing these deci­sions can be a headache, but being informed of all the options avail­able will help you choose what works best for your café or cof­fee shop.

Whether you ulti­mately choose to offer reusable mugs for in-house cus­tomers and/or reusable to-go mugs for sale, one deci­sion you will have to make regard­less is what kind of single-use cup you will offer. The plethora of options on the mar­ket today can be dizzy­ing, but it helps to assess what you are per­son­ally hop­ing to get out of your cups. Is a branded cup some­thing you con­sider indis­pen­si­ble? In this case, many cup man­u­fac­tur­ers have imprint­ing options to cus­tomize your cups, for a small fee. For instance, Moducup® will imprint multi-colored logos or designs on your cups, which is a great way to imprint your brand on your customer’s mind.

Is choos­ing an eco-friendly dis­pos­able cup impor­tant to you? If so, cups made from recy­cled mate­r­ial and com­postable cups are both cham­pi­oned as “green” cup options. For instance, Solo offers eco-forward® cups with recy­cled con­tent and a plant-based com­postable cup. Additionally, LBP Manufacturing offers their Clayx® cup, which accord­ing to their web­site boasts “the high­est post-consumer fiber con­tent in the indus­try.” For other com­postable prod­ucts, Stalkmarket offers 100% com­postable cups and lids made from sug­ar­cane fiber-based paper­board. Similarly, Biodegradable Food Service makes fully com­postable cups made from bio-based mate­ri­als. Not only is their cup lin­ing petroleum-free, but they blend a for­mu­la­tion that gives it a higher heat resis­tance than other cups on the mar­ket today. Yet another com­pany fea­tur­ing cups that may be of inter­est to eco-conscious café and cof­fee shop own­ers is GreenGood®. GreenGood car­ries cups that are 100% com­postable and biodegradable.

Ultimately, it is the cup choice that has the most influ­ence on your other dis­pos­able cup-related deci­sions, as some cups will make addi­tional choices obso­lete. For instance, you can choose to offer a single-walled paper cup and then pro­vide sleeves for cus­tomers who want them. Or, you can offer cups with built in sleeves, or those that are made with insu­lat­ing mate­r­ial, thus elim­i­nat­ing the need to buy addi­tional mate­ri­als. A good exam­ple of a built-in sleeve prod­uct is Georgia-Pacific’s Insulair® eco cup, which accord­ing to Alec Frisch, Vice President of the Beverage Category at Georgia-Pacific is “avail­able with 12 or 25 per­cent recy­cled fiber options, and fea­tures an insu­lat­ing mid­dle layer made from 99 per­cent recy­cled fiber that keeps bev­er­ages hot while remain­ing com­fort­able to the touch.” Or International Paper’s Hold & Go® Cup, that accord­ing Joni Janis of International Paper, “elim­i­nates the need for the oper­a­tor to add a sleeve to a hot cup and pre­vents the café from double-cupping.” She adds “by using the Hold & Go® to cut out extra steps, oper­a­tors can ser­vice more cus­tomers while reduc­ing their wait­ing time.” Additionally, accord­ing to Larinda Becker, Vice President of Foodservice and Marketing for Solo Cup Company, Solo offers “the Duo Shield® insu­lated paper hot cup, a dual layer paper prod­uct with an over­wrap and air pock­ets to insu­late and elim­i­nate the need for a sleeve or a dou­ble cup.” With so many choices avail­able, a café owner should be care­ful to eval­u­ate what is the best fit for their par­tic­u­lar needs before plac­ing ini­tial orders. Most com­pa­nies will send sam­ples if requested, so if you are hav­ing a hard time decid­ing between sev­eral dif­fer­ent prod­ucts, try them out for your­self first!

Another choice you will have to make con­cern­ing dis­pos­able prod­ucts is the lid. Although it may seem like choos­ing a lid is a fairly straight­for­ward process, there is actu­ally an incred­i­ble array of lid options avail­able today. Things to be con­sid­ered when choos­ing lids are: price, design, ease-of-use and of course, cus­tomer demands. The prices of lids are going to vary depend­ing largely on which design fea­tures they uti­lize. To that end, there are sev­eral dif­fer­ent lid design fea­tures that can have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on your customer’s expe­ri­ence. Some lids fea­ture a built in clo­sure such as Double Team’s Slide-Lock® lid. Regarding this lid, Ida Chan of Double-Team remarks “The end user can slide the lock and cover the drink open­ing of the lid while he/she is not drink­ing or he/she is on the go.” Features like this can greatly increase cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion for only min­i­mal addi­tional costs. Double Team’s Slide-Lock® lid is one inno­v­a­tive way café own­ers can address the prob­lem of drink spillage, which is both irri­tat­ing and dan­ger­ous to the cus­tomer. Andy McClusky of StixToGo, Inc com­ments to this end: “a cof­fee shop want­ing to pre­vent spilling and enhance the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has two choices. They can pur­chase a self-closing lid, or plug the hole.” The lat­ter choice is what StixToGo aims to accom­plish through their com­bi­na­tion plug and stir stick, which fits in the hole of the lid and effec­tively blocks spillage while also serv­ing as a func­tional cof­fee utensil.

Furthermore, lid inno­va­tions do not stop at sim­ple sleeves or plugs, there are also some prod­ucts on the mar­ket today that have the poten­tial to com­pletely alter the way your cus­tomers expe­ri­ence their cof­fee. One great exam­ple of this is the Xpress™ lid by SmartCup. This lid has a built in French press, and fits on most stan­dard cup sizes. With this kind of prod­uct the cus­tomers are able to press the cof­fee on their own, and thus save valu­able time. This is one inno­v­a­tive way cafés and cof­fee shops can offer fresh, single-cup cof­fee to cus­tomers on the go. Another inno­v­a­tive prod­uct on the mar­ket today is the burn-preventing Coollid®. The Coollid® fea­tures a reser­voir inside the lid that cools hot drinks to a com­fort­able tem­per­a­ture before drink­ing. Yet another excit­ing new lid option comes from Repurpose® Compostables, who man­u­fac­ture a plas­tic lid which is made out of maize, not petro­leum like most plas­tics. These lids are 100% com­postable and con­structed to biode­grade in 45 days after ini­tial dis­posal. In short, while lid deci­sions may appear triv­ial at first, it is these small inno­va­tions that can ulti­mately make the dif­fer­ence between keep­ing a cus­tomer and los­ing him or her to the competition.

Beyond cups and lids, today’s café and cof­fee shop owner must think about how they are going to deal with the heat-transfer issue asso­ci­ated with hot drinks. As pre­vi­ously stated, some cups already incor­po­rate sleeves in to their design, elim­i­nat­ing the need to buy sleeves sep­a­rately. However, while built-in sleeves have their ben­e­fits, keep­ing the sleeve sep­a­rate allows a cus­tomer to make the choice on their own – either using or fore­go­ing the sleeve. Beyond just choice, there are sev­eral other rea­sons why café and cof­fee shop own­ers might choose sep­a­rate sleeves. According to Don Scherer of Britevision “Sleeves are more envi­ron­men­tally friendly, using less then half the paper of a double-walled insu­lated cup.” However, con­cern­ing the envi­ron­ment, it is not only the quan­tity of mate­ri­als used but also the source of those mate­ri­als that con­tribute to how truly “green” that prod­uct is. For exam­ple, some sleeves are made out of vir­gin fiber, while oth­ers con­tain some por­tion of recy­cled or com­postable mate­r­ial. For instance, Scherer says of Britevision sleeves, “BriteVision prints sleeves on three dif­fer­ent paper stocks. All are 100% recy­clable and 100% com­postable.” Similarly, Java Jacket offers cof­fee cup sleeves that are made of recy­cled paper, so eco-conscious café own­ers can feel good about their choice while cater­ing to the desires of their eco-conscious cus­tomers as well. Another con­sid­er­a­tion when choos­ing a lid is the poten­tial that your branded cup will be hid­den under­neath a generic sleeve. One inno­v­a­tive solu­tion to this prob­lem is Double Wrap’s Comfort Grip Wrap™, which is a translu­cent sleeve that pre­vents heat trans­fer but allows your logo to show through.

With all of these choices, it is easy to for­get the other side of the cup mar­ket: in-house and to-go mugs. Because large cof­fee chains have such an influ­ence on today’s con­sumer, many con­sumers now believe that pur­chased pre­pared cof­fee drinks should be served in a paper cup, regard­less of whether the patron plans on tak­ing the cof­fee to-go or stay­ing to drink it there. However, by only serv­ing drinks in the stan­dard paper cup, cof­fee shop own­ers can be miss­ing out on an oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate a last­ing impres­sion on their cus­tomer. To this end, Pat Bowser of Sunset Hill Stoneware com­ments, “Coffee shop own­ers cre­ate last­ing impres­sions by the way their prod­uct tastes and how it is pre­sented to cus­tomers. Sipping from a paper cup, to a plas­tic trav­eler, to china mug, to a hand­crafted pot­tery mug all leave a dif­fer­ent impres­sion to cus­tomers. Owners have to make sure their prod­uct and ser­vice matches the busi­ness mes­sage they want to com­mu­ni­cate.” Bowser explains, “The hand thrown qual­ity of our prod­ucts makes them stand out. Wrapping your hands around our hand­crafted pot­tery feels com­fort­ing. The touch, the feel, and the appear­ance – it just feels good. And the cus­tomiza­tion of tak­ing a cof­fee shop’s art­work and cap­tur­ing the intri­cate ele­ments of the design pro­motes the brand and whole­some­ness qual­ity of the bev­er­age inside.” One major con­sid­er­a­tion regard­ing the use of reusable mugs for in-house cus­tomers is the addi­tional labor and time invest­ment required to serve, clear and clean the mugs. However, for cof­fee shops that have the means, in-house mugs can be one great way to set your shop apart from the large chains.

Additionally, a great way to achieve fur­ther brand­ing for your shop is to offer imprinted to-go mugs for sale. Potentially, this mer­chan­dise could be offered along with a pro­mo­tional pro­gram such as a dis­count for cus­tomers who bring the mug back to the café. Promotion or not, branded mugs are a great way to increase prof­its and keep your café or cof­fee shop on your customer’s mind. Planetary Design is one com­pany that sells reusable to-go mugs that can be imprinted with your café or cof­fee shops logo, for a small fee. However, it is impor­tant to remem­ber that cus­tomers will often forgo pur­chas­ing and uti­liz­ing a reusable to-go mug because of the incon­ve­nience. Regarding this prob­lem, Erez Toker of Vessel Drinkware com­ments, “eco-friendliness is obvi­ously not moti­va­tion enough for the vast major­ity of retail cus­tomers to bring along their own mug… Our Vessel Drinkware fans remem­ber to take their mugs and bot­tles with them because they have made an emo­tional con­nec­tion with their favorite designs. That emo­tional con­nec­tion is the most pow­er­ful ele­ment of the equa­tion. Toting that piece around becomes a nat­ural, fun part of their lifestyle.” To this end, café and cof­fee shop own­ers might see higher sales and increased repet­i­tive usage by offer­ing to-go mugs with inno­v­a­tive and attrac­tive designs, rather than sim­ply stick­ing with more tra­di­tional options.

Regardless of what you ulti­mately choose to offer in your café, don’t for­get that cups can be a fun part of the expe­ri­ence, espe­cially for your cus­tomer. With a lit­tle bit of research and time you can tai­lor your cup pro­gram to be a per­fect fit for your spe­cific needs. And remem­ber, run­ning a suc­cess­ful café always involves trial and error, if you end up unhappy with your ini­tial choices you can sim­ply go through the process again until you find what works for you.

For a com­plete list of cup and cup acces­sory ven­dors, please see
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