"When our machine is not running, the mood in the company goes down!"
Interview with Jörg Baumgart, CEO of Kaffee Partner GmbH
Coffee is an indispensable fuel for creative ideas and substantial meetings in German offices. For over 50 years, Kaffee Partner GmbH has been offering its B2B clients in the DACH region targeted solutions that range from the devices and their maintenance to the automated reordering of coffee beans and additional products. CEO Jörg Baumgart spoke with Wirtschaftsforum about the comprehensive range of services his company offers.
Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Baumgart, since 1973, Kaffee Partner GmbH has been promising fresh coffee enjoyment at the workplace – where exactly do you support your customers?
Jörg Baumgart: Although we have naturally expanded and rounded off our product and service segment over the years, our company name has always remained our programme: With our fully automatic coffee machines in seven different product variants, we enable our B2B partners to supply their employees with high-quality coffee products, from classic Café Crema to Espresso, Cappuccino, or Latte Macchiato. Meanwhile, we also offer vegan toppings and cocoa variants. To be able to fulfill our quality promise sustainably, we consistently rely on beans-to-cup machines, in which the coffee is freshly ground for each order, and the final product is optionally enriched with fresh milk or milk powder. The water supply can either be through refillable tanks or a direct connection to the drinking water line.
Wirtschaftsforum: Beyond maintenance?
Jörg Baumgart: A central element of our mission is to take as much complexity as possible off our customers' shoulders, so ideally, they don't have to worry about their fully automated coffee machines at all. For this purpose, through further digitalization of our machines, we have set up an automatic product sourcing system where the customer doesn't have to manually reorder the coffee beans and additional products. Instead, our device automatically initiates a sufficiently far-sighted stocking based on the consumption data – provided that the customer wants to use our coffee products with our machine, which is, of course, not a must! For businesses where employees are expected to contribute a small share to the costs, we also offer various payment options, for example, via mobile phone.