Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1956, Brunetti initially started as a cake and pastry shop. It was established by Giorgio Angele, who came to Australia as the official pastry chef for the Italian Olympic team. Deciding to stay in the country, he opened his first Kew East location later that year.
Coffee has long been a staple of Melbourne’s culture. While its origins can be traced back to the 1880s, coffee exploded in popularity following the Second World War. A wave of migration from Italy made espresso consumption and café culture more popular than ever. Now, the central business district (CBD) is the city’s coffee hub. The streets are lined with specialty coffee shops renowned for barista artistry, open-plan interior design, and experimental brewing techniques.
In the seven decades since, the business has evolved alongside its home city. Now, it’s an international business with an online store, locations across Melbourne, and previous franchise outlets in Singapore and Dubai. In 2021, Giorgio’s son Yuri took over and rebranded the business as Brunetti Oro. Now, it focuses on modern solutions like e-commerce and a new Brunswick location.
Whether it’s cakes, pastries, or coffee, quality ingredients and efficient service are central to its operations. To speed up its milk dispensing process and save space on the shop floor, Brunetti uses Flo-Smart across its locations.
I spoke to Linh Ly, Group Coffee Specialist at Brunetti Oro, to hear how Flo-Smart saves time and money without compromising on the business’s reputation for excellence.
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The benefits of a Flo-Smart system for Brunetti
For hospitality businesses, speed and efficiency are essential. Considering Brunetti has three locations across Melbourne alone, it needs to uphold these values to stand out against the city’s 2,000 coffee shops.
This is why milk dispensers such as Flo-Smart are particularly beneficial for high-volume businesses. Without equipment that saves time on dispensing a range of milks, with multiple dairy bladders connected to the systems, it can increase wait times and consumer dissatisfaction.
For example, preparing an iced latte in a coffee shop can be time-consuming. Baristas have to manually pull an espresso shot and pour milk into a cup, which takes time and can be imprecise. During this process, staff can’t take care of any other tasks on the shop floor, such as serving other customers, putting out stock, or preparing tables.
Considering the extent of Melbourne’s morning coffee rush, seemingly minor bottlenecks can quickly add up. Efficiency issues like slower preparation times and inconsistent drink quality can negatively impact the customer experience, reduce sales, and affect a business’s reputation.
Our systems are designed to resolve these problems. Not only do they eliminate service bottlenecks in cafés – they also improve on quality and consistency. By dispensing a precise dose of milk or other drinks, it removes human error and ensures customers get exactly what they’re expecting. It can also dispense dairy, plant milks, coffee concentrate, syrups, and any other compatible liquid in six seconds or less. For Brunetti’s locations, this allows them to serve up to 1,000 drinks a day.
“Flo-Smart speeds up the coffee-making process,” says Linh. “This reduces waste and saves space in our cool room.” Therefore, it’s an ideal solution for coffee shops and cafés to save time on pouring milk, guaranteeing the consistent quality that consumers value.
Brunetti is expanding further in the future, with a recently opened location in Chadstone Shopping Centre and another in the works on Swanston Street, Melbourne. Using the system helps the team to speed up its drink dispensing and preserve its reputation for quality.
How does a Flo-Smart system make Brunetti’s operations more efficient?
Across its Melbourne locations, Brunetti uses Flo-Smart systems to dispense milk for its drinks. Depending on your model, these units can dispense up to four different types of liquid at once, drawing from under-the-counter pipes connected to refrigerated bladders. For cafés, for example, they can contain a range of milk options as well as espresso concentrate for iced coffee.
Brunetti uses Flo-Smart with separate bladders to dispense whole, skimmed, and non-dairy milks in the same line. This reduces staff movement, as they don’t need to go back and forth to fridges or across the counter to find and pour milk.
The automation of making iced coffee has been particularly valuable. “It speeds up the process of making coffee,” Linh says. You can choose between automatic, preset dispensing options, one-touch dispensing based on size, or manual press-and-hold settings.
That way, the volume of liquid the Flo-Smart dispenses will adjust to the drink in question. For menus that have a range of cold drinks, it means you can quickly pivot to serving other drinks.
Due to the system’s hands-free dispensing methods, the process of serving iced coffee and other chilled drinks becomes much easier for baristas. All they need to do is place a jug or cup beneath each tap and wait for the drink to pour.
For high-volume hospitality settings, you can seamlessly switch between multiple liquids to serve a number of beverages. It’s done with the same machine that has a low countertop footprint, maximising your space and efficiency.
Flo-Smart systems also draw liquids from bladders stored in cool rooms. Because of this, you don’t need to keep dairy- and plant-based milks in refrigerators at the bar, which saves on storage space both above and below the counter. You can store other ingredients like cocktail mixers or food to diversify the products your customers can buy at the bar.
“Saving space in our cool room [is one of Flo-Smart’s key benefits],” says Linh. Since you can order reusable kegs of milk instead of plastic bottles and prepare each bladder at the start of day, it hugely reduces a business’s single-use packaging outlay. This is more important than ever to your customers, with 78% of consumers considering sustainability a top priority when spending money with a business.
How Flo-Smart reduces Brunetti’s waste
Minimising waste is another benefit of using the system for high-volume businesses like Brunetti.
Pouring milk by hand for iced coffee and other drinks is imprecise and inefficient by nature. Baristas may accidentally pour too much into the jug and need to dispose of the surplus, which goes entirely to waste. Similarly, spillage is very common as the drink is prepared and poured.
Since these machines automatically dispense a pre-set amount of liquid, it eliminates this waste and the sunken costs associated with it. You won’t have to deal with issues like spillage or overpouring, and can instead budget your milk costs more precisely. Therefore, it doesn’t just save on wasted ingredients, but on operational costs as well.
These systems are incredibly easy to clean, too. Brunetti runs automated weekly system cleaning for Flo-Smart’s line chilling system, ensuring hygienic compliance and minimising the risk of human error.
Brunetti’s use of Flo-Smart showcases the benefits of automated dispensing systems. They significantly increase efficiency in drink dispensing and remove human error to optimise workflows and minimise waste.
To get a quote on your own Flo-Smart beverage dispensing system, visit our website or get in touch with us directly.
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