car dealership to place one machine
in each of the company's dealerships.
Alongside the Eccellenza mod-
els, Capital Coffee also offers other
single-cup brewers including Star-
bucks' Interactive Cup Brewer, The
Café Mio Brewing System, Keurig,
BUNN, Bloomfeld, Avalon and Fla-
via. A personal favorite has been
VKI's Suprema, which Sather calls
a "work horse." Capital Coffee will
only place brewers that it believes
offer an integrated consumer experi-
ence. This includes offering gourmet
beverages such as cappuccinos, lattes
and mochas, as well as a 21st cen-
tury design, which can include touch-
screens. "I can't fake it," said Sather.
"If I don't like a machine, I won't put
it with my customers, simple as that."
Each year Capital Coffee pur-
chases between $100,000 and
$150,000 in coffee brewer equipment
and spends around $5,000 per month
on parts. Sather notes it takes about
two years to get back a return on some
of his more high-tech machines.
Millennials and even Genera-
tion Z consumers motivate Capital
Coffee to provide machines on the
cutting edge of technology. "I have a
daughter who is 11 and these young
people, they want the good stuff," said
Sather, who attends NAMA each year
in order to stay with the most cur-
rent trends in technology and coffee.
"I always want to see what my com-
petition sees. This year I was happy
that I was already familiar with all
Lessons From Vending
In the early 2000s, a Capital Coffee client asked Sather if he would be
willing to service vending, as well as coffee, and so Sather obliged. Within
a small amount of time Sather had 20 vending accounts and found him-
self spending hours flling machines and less time on coffee. "My phone
rang constantly about problems with the machines," said Sather. "With
vending, you have to go all in and you need to do the volume to make it
worth it and I knew I was never going to be big into vending," he said.
After one year, Sather decided to sell his vending routes.
"We really wanted to focus on what we do best, and that is coffee," he said.
38 Automatic Merchandiser VendingMarketWatch.com September 2015
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