Why do some coffee shops seem to get everything right?
They’re always busy, their drinks show up on social media, and they seem to be turning a healthy profit—while others are struggling just to stay afloat. In our four decades of working with hundreds of cafés across the UK, we’ve seen the same key traits come up time and time again in the most successful operations.
So, How Do Great Coffee Shops Stand out?
The key is, it’s rarely just about the coffee. These days, it takes a lot more than just a great cup to separate great cafes from average ones. Typically, great coffee shops nail the basics. So, in this guide, we're outlining the nine key traits we see great coffee shops nail time and time again that help them to stand out from the rest.
Great Coffee Shops...
1. Choose a Great Location
A great coffee shop understands the importance of having a fantastic location on its success, and knows that where you set up business will shape every aspect of how your business operates: From the type of customer it attracts to the kind of service it should be providing.
Even with award-winning baristas and top-of-the-line equipment and a beautiful interior space, being tucked away on a quiet side street will make it harder to attract footfall and it will take some serious marketing efforts to bring in new customers.
Great coffee shops also tailor the experience they offer with their location. In high-traffic areas, great coffee shops understand the need for speed and consistency, clear signage, and a grab-and-go model that supports a faster experience. Whereas in a slower-paced setting like a neighbourhood café or a garden centre, they can afford that luxury of time and offer a more relaxed experience.
The best cafés start out with a fantastic location and then they use it to impact every decision they make about the type of business they become.
2. Understand Their Customers
The best coffee shops really understand their customers. They know who they are, where they’re going, what they’re doing with their day, and how coffee can fit into their lives.
One of the easiest ways to lose customers is to offer an experience that doesn’t match the needs of the people walking through the door. Maybe you’ve built your coffee shop around a slower, relaxed, table-service environment, but you’re right next to a train station and your customers are looking for a speedy grab-and-go option first thing in the morning. Or maybe you’ve completely streamlined your business for speed and takeaway options, but you’re in a cosy neighbourhood café and your customers are looking for a more bespoke and relaxed experience.
A great coffee shop doesn’t just attract customers successfully, but it also retains them by offering the exact kind of coffee moment that that person is looking for.
3. Have a Great Drinks Menu
The third thing great cafés get right is that they serve a fantastic menu of drinks. The heart of any great café is its coffee and its menu.
They make sure that they have drinks and coffee types that really align with their customers’ experiences and preferences, whether they’re serving a traditional Italian-style blend of coffees or a more flavour-focused, high-quality single origin. Great coffee shops offer a coffee and a menu of drinks that their customers will love.
Along with carefully selecting the beans according to the taste preferences of their customers, great coffee shops offer a fantastic menu of drinks and also bring in some more rotating seasonal options, like a guest single-origin filter coffee or a seasonal rotating menu of specialty drinks.
4. Invest in Their Equipment
The fourth thing that great coffee shops understand is the importance of investing in high-quality coffee equipment, making sure to choose not just the right type of machine, but the right quality of machine as well. This is really key to making sure that you serve the kind of drinks that your customers are looking for, and that your machines can keep up with the level of service and the drink volumes that you want to provide.
Coffee shops with a barista experience will want to invest in high-quality manual machines like traditional espresso machines, coffee grinders, and filter coffee machines. These let your baristas tailor the experience and get the best out of their coffee and offer a more personal service.
Whereas a coffee shop that is prioritising speed and consistency understands the importance of investing in high-quality automated equipment like bean-to-cup machines and super traditional machines that help your baristas with speed and getting a base level of great quality every single time.
Great coffee shops don’t just choose the best type of coffee machine for their café, but also ones that are of high enough quality to support their business in terms of speed, volumes, and coffee quality.
5. Optimise Workflow
We’ve all had that experience of walking into a new coffee shop for the first time and not knowing where to stand, where to queue, how to order, where to pay, and who to talk to.
Great coffee shops understand the need to put their customers at ease from the moment they step through the door. So they utilise things like well-designed queuing systems, clear signage, and an optimised bar experience that makes it obvious where they should order and where to collect their drinks.
But design and workflow also matters behind the bar as well—for your teams. Great coffee shops pay a lot of attention to the efficiency of their bar design. They have one clear direction of flow for all of their equipment, and you can always see that the place where the customer orders the drink is the same area that the drink preparation starts, and the whole process flows seamlessly to the other side where the customer picks up their drink.
One coffee shop we worked with was able to reduce their queues by half, with one less member of staff on shift, by properly designing their café for speed and efficiency.
6. Invest in Their Staff
A coffee shop can only be as good as the people that work there day in and day out, and great coffee shops understand the importance of investing in passionate and knowledgeable staff.
It’s too often the case where a great coffee shop is completely reliant on the skills of one barista and when they leave, it turns them from a great coffee shop into an average one.
Great coffee shops know that people eventually leave, and barista skills are ones that are difficult to learn. To stay on top of this, they consistently invest in the ongoing training of their staff. They likely work with a premium coffee supplier that offers regular barista training for their wholesale partners, they might sign them up to SCA barista courses, they'll also invest in equipment that can help automate some of the coffee making steps, and they also offer competitive salaries to attract experienced and passionate baristas.
7. Expect the Unexpected
Anyone who’s run a coffee shop—or any kind of business—knows that if something can go wrong, it probably will.
Machines break. Staff call in sick. You run out of stock. But great coffee shops expect this, and they put systems in place so the customer never feels the disruption. Here’s what they do:
- Daily cleaning routines keep equipment in top condition, supported by regular preventative maintenance from an engineer.
- They have an engineer support package with their supplier - so if a machine breaks down, help is on the way fast.
- Staff are cross-trained to cover each other’s roles when needed, keeping service running smoothly.
- They manage stock proactively, often using real-time stock monitoring to avoid running out of key products.
- They’re prepared for Wi-Fi or card machine failures, with simple solutions like accepting cash as a backup.
- Staff are trained with clear customer service protocols, so any complaints or issues are handled calmly and professionally.
Problems happen. What separates a good coffee shop from a great one is how invisible those problems are to the customer, and how they are able to minimise the impacts on service levels and business performance.
8. Market Themselves Effectively
Great coffee shops also understand the importance of marketing themselves effectively. They could have the best coffee in town, but if no one’s heard about them and no one knows they’re there, it’s not going to make a difference.
They don’t just wait for customers to walk through the door, but they build awareness and engagement to drive new customers through effective marketing. This could be having a really strong social media presence—like on Instagram or TikTok.
It could be collaborating with other local businesses or creators and maybe having a loyalty scheme that gives benefits to customers that keep coming back. They also regularly hold events and promotions like new menu items or kitchen takeovers. They incentivise customers to leave reviews, and they respond to all of them honestly, even the good and the bad.
Great cafés don’t just rely on offering a great service and growing through word of mouth, but they also put a lot of effort into marketing themselves competitively to attract new customers, and to re-engage their existing audience.
9. Work with a Great Partner
The final thing that all great coffee shops seem to have is a fantastic and reliable partner, whether that's a business consultant, a franchise group, or their wholesale coffee company. Running a coffee shop takes a huge amount of effort, knowledge and expertise, and great coffee shops understand that they can’t do it all by themselves.
So they have a reliable partner that they can lean on, with barista training, machine servicing, business expertise, and marketing support.