step up and make a commitment to get rid of single use cups altogether. go 100% with Again Again.

Go you! This is our future as a community, and your future as a cafe. We commend that you are an early adopter.

There are lots of reasons why you might want to do this.

The headline here is that you will save an enormous amount of waste from hitting the landfill each year, but the equally exciting silver-lining is that you will save your cafe many thousands in cash as well. Oh, and it’s easier.

The challenge for some is the threat to coffee sales, but we have got great evidence that this is a much smaller risk that you think. Read on…

Impact

The collective action of Again Again cafes creates huge impact. Our conservative estimate is that we are diverting a  minimum of 800,000 cups a year from landfill. Within this, we see that 44% of that impact comes from just 11 cafes. (11 cafes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). 

That’s right… 11 cafes in the Again Again network have made the bold move to ditch Single-use cups (SUCs) altogether, therefore their impact is 10X - 14X greater than cafes who have Again Again, but don’t really push it.

Going 100% maximises impact and will also save cafes the most money possible on running costs, cutting out all costs of SUCs.

We interviewed these 11 cafes to see what their magic sauce was. What we found out blew our minds... Across the board, they didn’t report that they were any better at selling the idea, but that

once they went 100% it was waaaaaayyyyy easier. 

Without SUC options, there was no persuading required at the counter. The cafes noted both a big uptick in people using their own cups, and hardly any pushback from people who went on to borrow one of ours.

Their opening question is “Is that borrow or BYO?’, and if the customer hadn’t sorted that out for themselves, staff simply defaulted to, “no problem, we’ll loan you one.” It is a done deal.

We have already developed a set of in-store and social media collateral to support your cafe moving to 100%. It’s ready to roll.

Are you sitting?… These cafes report that they save between $2500 and $6000 a year.

Not purchasing any SUCs at all is a massive saving. 

Hard to believe? A branded, compostable cup is probably costing you between 24c and 27c. On the platform, the cost per serve may be as little as 16c.

All the cafes note that a few coffee sales were lost, but not nearly enough to warrant this being considered a commercial threat. The cost savings massively outweighed the coffee sales that were lost.

Post-COVID, there are valid concerns about droplets on personal reusable cups.

We agree* that returning cups of unknown cleanliness may have virus-ridden droplets on them, and you can’t have that in public serveries. We don’t agree that a return to using only single-use cups is any sort of solution to this. A return to only using SUCs uses one crisis to induce fear that exacerbates another one. 

(*that’s not an opinion piece. It’s a fact.)

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand we have robust standards around sanitisation in cafes. If your cafe can serve safely in crockery, you can serve in Again Again cups. This has now been approved by the NZ government. We advise you to use our best-practice workflow for collecting the returned cups for re-sanitisation.

Customers using their personal reusable cups has also been approved, but it does require a significant alteration of workflow for the baristas to achieve contactless pours. Again Again is your most efficient and scalable, waste-free option for serving takeaway coffees.