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How we served up our biggest year yet

As we all start winding down and looking forward to a well-deserved break over the festive season, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to look back over the many highlights of a fantastic year.

2022 was an incredible year for us here at The Barista. The numbers say it all – we got through a whopping 1326kg of coffee beans, making over 100,000 coffees across 162 different events. But serving great coffee with a smile is just one part of what we do.

We’ve also been working away behind the scenes to ensure we continue being the very best in the mobile barista business. That includes working with organisations like ESSA to ensure we’re keeping sustainability at the forefront of our operations, as well as beginning some exciting work on a brand-new website – something we can’t wait for you to see in early 2023.

There’s been plenty to celebrate, so read on to find out about the highlights of 2022, as well as what we’re looking forward to next year.

What was the highlight of 2022 for The Barista?

Our ESSA Gold award for sustainability is definitely up there! We’ve done a lot of work with ESSA in 2022, working hard to become a fully accredited member, which we achieved earlier this year. You can find out more about that accreditation and what it means for us in this blog.

The news that we achieved gold on the ESSA sustainability module was incredible, and a massive achievement by all the team – Elsie in particular, who was instrumental throughout the project and who very deservedly won the Unsung Hero Award at the recent ESSA awards.

A final shout out goes to our summer team trip – another definite highlight.

Have there been any stand-out events this year?

There are a few that come to mind. Firstly, Radical Motorsports had a roadshow this year which we loved being a part of. We served coffees at seven different track days, across five different circuits, over seven months.

As ever, the BIBA conference is a constant stand out due to how many bars we have running across the one event. This year we worked at bars for fifteen different clients!

Finally, our MacMillan Coffee Morning. It well exceeded our expectations for turn out as well as money raised. The finished total was a fantastic £510.21 which the team are all really proud of.

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What’s the biggest achievement for The Barista this year?

The standout achievement is the number of booking we delivered in November – an incredible 58 separate bookings! We’ve incredibly lucky to have the team and infrastructure in place to be able to deal with large amounts of bookings without ever compromising on excellent coffee and service.

Can you tell us a little bit about your work to become ESSA accredited this year, particularly when it comes to sustainability? How will this be carried on into 2023?

For the ESSA accreditation itself, we needed to put solid health and safety foundations into place. We’re committed to keeping these in place and will have to prove year on year that we’re sticking to them in order to remain accredited with the organisation. The accreditation backs up the fact that we’re a safe supplier that operates to the highest of standards, and we will be renewing it in the beginning months of 2023.

For our sustainability award, we set out some initial goals with a clear plan as to how we intend to achieve them in the coming year and beyond. We put into place practices to review our procurement, to ensure that we’re using what we believe to be the most sustainable options available to us for our supplies. For 2023, we’re going to push forward and review our goals as we try to make progress towards them. One of our goals in to be graded as platinum by 2027, however, we think we’re going to try to pull this one forward a couple of years!

What are you looking forward to in 2023? Anything new or exciting you can tell us about, or any big events coming up in the first few months?

The team are looking forward to going tree planting with Leeds Children’s Charity in mid-January. The local council is aiming to plant 36,000 trees at this particular woodland creation site this winter, so we’re hoping we can all help with a few of those!

Finally, we can’t wait to embrace the new juice arm to The Barista! We’ll let you know more about this in due course, but get ready to see lots of branded juice bottles to come in 2023…

Finally, how are the team celebrating Christmas?

We’re celebrating with Christmas jumpers and Secret Santa followed by a team social. The plan is darts at Flight Club and some bowling followed by some delicious food at Chaophraya!

Our 2022 in numbers

110,040 coffees served

306 separate bookings, with a total of 342 bars

162 different events

80 venues

640 days combined service

1326kg of coffee beans