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We at Coffee House are always quick to nail over-enthusiastic marketing-speak, and so when we most recently spoke to David Latchem of Café du Monde, we had some fun pointing out that one piece of his recent publicity had included a reference to his ‘legendary’ service.  Come on, we said, tell us some legends about your company.

To his very great credit, David laughed a lot, and proceeded to get down to the practicalities of what he is trying to do – which, in rather more prosaic language, is to be ‘a coffee company which finds the customer the most reliable tools to deliver a beverage service’.  Now, that wording is not so dramatic, but it does have some rather entertaining and extremely thorough background to it.

“What sets us apart,” said David, “ is that we operate a nationwide service in a personal way. We deliberately have a system in which every phone in the office rings for any incoming call, so somebody always answers it - we certainly don’t have a ‘dial 1 for this’ kind of system, and so we make people feel special because we make sure we answer the call properly.”

In working to find the best machines to offer to customers, Café du Monde went through a lot of trial and error before devising its own system – the directors decided to select the machines which were best in their class, irrespective of whether they came from the same manufacturer or not.

“We might find that one machine works best at the low end, and another at the very high end, and that an entirely different maker's machine works best in the middle," explains Latchem. "We will not be limited by what any one manufacturer has available – we will pick the right machine for the job, whoever makes it.

"We are also sufficiently hands-on that we look very carefully at every aspect of a machine - we pull these things apart before we take them on!"

The next decision was to put their own name on the machines, as a way of demonstrating that they took responsibility for them. The brand is Mon Ami, followed by a number - which is  the number of cappuccinos the chine can make in an hour. 

Putting their own brand on means, he says, that the company takes responsibility for any problems that crop up.

“We employ a co-ordinator to stand between the customer and our nationwide team of engineers – the customer only has to talk to us, not to a manufacturer, and not to an engineer.  We know our engineers, we trust them, and both they and we know the machines.  If the engineer hits a problem, we step in and sort it out – for the customer, this all has to be our problem.”

Sometimes, says David Latchem, the company's demanding attitude to machine choice proves itself quite dramatically.

“My business partner was Sandhurst-trained in engineering, messing around with all kinds of nuclear things, and his training is borne out by his analytical understanding of what a machine can do. 

“This has had differing results – we once fitted an overflow control of our own devising to a machine, to overcome the known problem of staff forgetting to switch the thing off, and although it was a costly innovation, it did a lot for our clients’ confidence in us… and the manufacturer adopted the idea later.  

“On the other hand, we have also tested certain new machines and been doubtful about them and not taken them on… and, some months later, we have not been surprised to have seen the ‘product recall’ notices!”

(Among the machines currently selected are the Franke Evolution, and interestingly the La Spaziale ‘Special’, which is a ‘budget’ version of the hi-tech ones created by this Italian maker. “This is a bit of an oddball in their range, but it works – it delivers a high volume of water, and it’s solidly built. It’s a very useful machine and has been very well received. “)

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Café du Monde is equally demanding of its coffee… but its most successful move was in knowing when to stand back.

“When we first began, the idea was to enable any member of a hospitality operator’s staff to serve a good cup of coffee at any time of day or night. 

“So, we became the first company to sort out the dosage problem in sachets, the first one to sort out the sediment problem in cafetieres, and so on.

“In those days people didn’t talk about ‘origin’, they just wanted all-day coffees and after-dinner coffees.  We spent weeks living in the ICO library, learning, and going round roasters looking for someone with the right ‘feel’ for us.  In the end, I said to a roaster that I needed something rich, smooth, and with a carrying aftertaste... and left them to it. 

“What they produced started getting us compliments, so I went back to the roaster and said ‘what did you do, to win me all these compliments?’   he said something interesting – he said we were the first customer who hadn’t interfered with the blend, but said what we wanted and left them to get on with it!”

The second unusual thing the company did was to get away from the ordinary packaging.

“The roaster asked if we wanted the silver bag or the gold one, and we said no, we had already designed our packaging.  They said ‘why design packaging for catering use? The consumer isn’t going to see it’, and we said no, but the staff will.

“And if the staff see something which is packaged as if it’s special, they’ll take more care serving it!”

The choice of tea turned out to be a particularly testing one.

“When we began, one of the people who put capital behind us was a former tea planter, and he kept telling us ‘do something special with your tea’.  He was probably ahead of his time, but we’ve now found that one of our big secrets is that people don’t know our name, and when they find it, they think of us as ‘a discovery’.

“So we didn’t want to go down the obvious route – we did try to work with one of the big companies, but they tried to copy all our ideas for themselves, and we were quite glad when they got it all wrong! 

“Eventually it was Newby we decided to go with, and that first advice turned out to be right - don’t serve them something they can find in a supermarket, but keep the experience special for the customer.”

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One of Cafe du Monde’s favourite ideas was Service en Chambre, born of the need for an answer to the trade’s constant exasperation about the way coffee is served in hotel rooms.  The answer turned out to be an extremely elegant stainless-steel cafetiere, and Café du Monde’s own invention of coffee in a correctly-portioned cafetiere bag – no mess for either the guest or the staff.

The next step was ‘Service en Chambre Petite’, which put everything necessary for a first-class hotel bedroom beverage service into a mahogany wooden box finished with a polished brass trim.  This rather classy box is built to hold a variable selection of ingredients - coffee, hot chocolate, sugar, biscuits and milk, and a range of black, green and fruit teas.  The system includes a small mahogany tray on which to place two white porcelain mugs embossed with the ‘Service en Chambre’ logo, and there is a one-litre stainless steel kettle instead of the two-person cafetiere.

Service en Chambre - the

way to make in-room hotel

coffee feel 'special'