Serving Temperature
When you order a latte at your local coffee shop, what temperature is it when they serve it to you?
Is it scaldingly hot, or lukewarm?
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the temperature will consistently go down when exposed to the environment (at least in most places), so serving your coffee slightly too warm isn’t a big deal.
If you just wait a few minutes, there’s a good likelihood your coffee cools to an acceptable temperature — the temperature at which you want to consume it.
The same might be said for ice cream. When shipping ice cream, it’s useful to freeze it until it’s really, really cold. But you don’t want to serve it that way.
You want your ice cream so cold it doesn’t melt all over your hand, but warm enough your tongue doesn’t freeze when you eat it. There’s an ideal serving temperature.
If you ever get the opportunity to eat at Jiro’s restaurant in Tokyo, he spends an incredible amount of time ensuring that when he serves you a piece of sushi, that it’s at the appropriate eating temperature. The extra bit of care to make sure the serving temperature and the eating temperature are the same is enough to charge that much more.
More so, when Jiro serves you sushi, you’d be foolish not to consume it immediately. It would be disrespectful, and the flavour will degrade. You both lose.
So what if you served coffee at the ideal consuming temperature? What if your latte came exactly at the right moment such that you would be foolish not to consume it then and there.
It would totally change the experience.
Maybe ordering coffee and having it served to you is only part of the experience. Maybe the other half is waiting for it to cool down and arrive at that perfect, personalized temperature at which you like to consume it.
Maybe the truly zen experience of making coffee is more about the waiting than it is about the consuming.
And perhaps the perfect serving temperature is significantly hotter than the consuming temperature, giving that ideal amount of time to allow it to cool.
Understanding what your customers want, and what form they want it in, is a fundamental part of how you deliver it to them. Some customers want it piping hot so they can just sit and allow it to cool. Others want it immediately so they can get on with their day.
Is your coffee shop a Parisian coffee shop, or a New York coffee shop?
The next time you serve your customers, take a minute to think about how, and when, they want to receive what you’re giving them. It might help accelerate the process, and prevent a few headaches along the way.
