I have been vegan myself for 7 years. If anyone should be wanting free non-dairy milk in cafe, it should be me, right? Yet I am so conflicted between my own ethics and trying to keep a small business a float. And for the record, I don’t see myself as a business man. I didn’t do a business degree, I am just a barista who loved making coffee and opened a shop. So this blog is more just me trying to work things out, because I genuinely don’t know the right thing to do?
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk in the news and on social media about cafes charging extra for non-dairy milk. There’s a Guardian article with Peta urging chains to drop the charge and customers have started making (fairly rude/snotty) comments to my team in the cafe.
People have been making more and more plant-based choices, But In times where small businesses are closing and struggling to make ends meet, this conversation feels like people telling me that I need to take yet more of a drop in turnover? There’s growing pressure on small cafés like ours to drop these charges, especially when bigger chains can afford to offer oat milk for free. But those chains have massive buying power and access to wholesale prices we just can’t match.
In Bond Street, we currently charge 30p for oat milk. For the last 4 full weeks this brought in £371.70, so averaging around £90 a week. So whats the right thing to do? If we take the hit and drop this extra charge, Does losing this income work as a marketing tool in the long run to bring in more trade? Is that the point? Or is it just the “right” thing to do for our planet and environment? It feels to me that this drop in income needs to come from somewhere, so does that mean all our prices go up to cover this?
In the cafe we only offer two options: whole dairy milk and oat milk. We’ve chosen to keep things simple and we want to be transparent about our costs. The barista-grade oat milk we use costs us £1.54 per litre, while our dairy milk is £1 per litre. For a 200ml serving in your latte or flat white, that’s 30p for oat milk vs 20p for dairy… just at cost. So I do see an argument that I am making 20p extra profit from our non-dairy customers, Maybe this isn’t the right ethical choice?
In the last 4 weeks, we sold 2968 milk based drinks, 1239 of those were non-dairy… Meaning 41% of my customers are drinking oat milk. But it does seem unfair to my dairy customers that they should be paying more to cover the oat milk cost? Or should I be putting my prices up as some kind of ethical tax on the dairy industry?
Putting our prices up raises more issues, Our shop is in such a saturated part of town, I can name 4 excellent cafes within less than a minute walk from our shop, let alone how many there are within a 5 minute walk radius! So if my prices go up will customers just leave to another shop? Or are they already doing that?
I don’t have a neat answer, just a bunch of open questions and a lot of thinking still to do. Running a café today isn’t just about making good coffee. I care about the planet, but I also care about my team, my customers, and keeping the doors open.
Maybe the solution isn’t black and white? For now, I just hope sharing this helps others see the complexity behind that 30p charge, that it isn’t about the rich guy trying to screw the little guy over, and maybe starts a more thoughtful conversation about how we all move forward.
But seriously, please stop having a go at my team about it, they’re just trying to do their jobs!