Challenge
- For Origin Coffee at high-volume events or locations, potential customers walk by very quickly.
- Consumer engagement is vital before launching new products.
- Manually making drinks with espresso concentrates is a slow and inefficient process.
Solution
- Flo-Smart dispenses drinks in under six seconds, including cold brew concentrate.
- These time savings allow staff to engage with visitors and introduce their new products.
- The multi-tap system means you can pour concentrates and milk simultaneously.
For coffee roasters launching a new product, exhibiting it to the market is vital. You need to understand how people respond to it, as well as how easy it is for coffee shop staff to use it in practice. That’s the case for Origin Coffee, one of the United Kingdom’s most reputable specialty coffee roasters, which is launching an espresso concentrate in 2026. Founded in 2004, it has expanded into a leading coffee chain with eight locations across the UK and a robust e-commerce programme.
To showcase its new espresso-based coffee concentrate, Origin Coffee teamed up with Flo-Smart at high-volume events like HostMilano 2025. The system helped them quickly and efficiently prepare coffees using their concentrates, attracting visitors to try their drinks.
To learn more about the partnership – both at HostMilano and beyond – I spoke to Joshua Tarlo, the Director of Growth at Origin Coffee. Read on for his insight.
How Flo-Smart helped Origin Coffee dispense espresso concentrates at HostMilano
At this year’s HostMilano event, Origin Coffee used Flo-Smart systems to dispense espresso-based iced coffees.
This collaboration was ideal for Joshua because quick service is essential at high-volume events and locations like this. After all, there may be thousands of visitors walking around a venue during a big event. To engage passers-by and encourage them to try their new products, Origin needs fast, efficient service.
“We worked with Flo-Smart to show our new espresso-based concentrate,” Joshua says. “With them, we’re creating new kinds of coffees, which you can dispense in under six seconds.”
Flo-Smart’s solution is ideal for these situations because of its incredibly quick service time. With one press of the touchscreen, you can automatically pour a serving in a matter of seconds. Manual processes using espresso concentrates – pouring the right amount, adding milk, then mixing – are much less efficient.
The dual-tap functionality was another key benefit for Origin Coffee. This means they could use one tap to dispense the espresso concentrate and another to dispense milk. It turns a traditionally time-consuming process into a near-instant workflow – without compromising on drink quality.
Flo-Smart offers multiple dispensing modes that allow the Origin team to adapt service in real time to high traffic. In its default fully automatic mode, the system delivers precise, hands-free dosing by detecting the metallic jug size placed under the sensor. When required, operators can instantly switch to one-touch dispensing or a press-and-hold manual mode via the LCD touchscreen, ensuring speed, control, and consistency in any service scenario.
This variety gave the Origin Coffee team versatility. It meant they could speed up with automatic dispensing during busy periods, focusing on other tasks like speaking to customers. By using a system that does the busywork for them, they could better engage with the people interested in their new espresso concentrates.
How does it also help at Origin’s coffee shops?
While the Flo-Smart system is especially useful for Origin Coffee at high-volume events, Joshua believes its benefits also extend to their coffee shops.
“We work with Flo-Smart across all of our different cafés – so around London, Edinburgh, and Bristol,” he tells me. In this sense, Flo-Smart is just as beneficial in customer-facing environments as it is at trade shows. “We mainly use it to dispense cold brew and milk,” Joshua adds.
The variety of liquids you can serve with Flo-Smart makes it ideal for these settings. For instance, you can dispense non-carbonated liquids including iced coffee, milk, matcha, and cocktails. That versatility caters to the most varied drinks menus, without requiring additional equipment for each new product launch.
For Origin Coffee, which has eight coffee shops across the UK, the speed and consistency of each serve is what makes Flo-Smart so important. “We can make our coffees so much quicker than before,” Joshua explains. Considering the number of customers that visit multi-site chains like Origin every day, being able to reliably pour drinks in a matter of seconds is vital.
Ultimately, the choice of equipment also feeds into the company’s reputation as one of the UK’s longest-running specialty coffee businesses. Having operated for over 20 years, there’s a level of expectation to meet. That’s not just for individual customers buying a drink, but also for wholesale partners assessing new products like espresso concentrates.
For this reason, your choice of dispensing equipment is no small matter. It can influence your daily drink service as well as your ability to showcase and launch new products in the future. Therefore, Origin Coffee’s long-standing partnership with Flo-Smart is a testament to the system’s utility and quality.
To get a quote for your own Flo-Smart beverage dispensing system, visit our website or get in touch with us directly.
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest developments.
