Same blend, same machines, four sites, four completely different flat whites. It's almost never the beans.
Start with stock age. If one site turns over 20kg a week and another 4kg, the slower site is serving older coffee regardless of what the delivery note says. Fixing delivery frequency per site often solves most of the gap on its own.
Water is next, and it's the most underrated variable in UK hospitality. Hardness varies enormously between regions and even between boroughs, and it changes extraction more than a small grind adjustment will.
Only then look at grind and dose. Recipe cards per site, checked weekly, remove the drift that happens when whoever opened up nudged the grinder and nobody wrote it down.
A blend with a wider extraction window makes all of this more forgiving — which matters when your teams have different levels of training.
Rarely, if every site is on the same roast batch. Bean age, water and grind usually explain the difference before the blend does.
Frequently enough that a bag is opened and finished well inside its freshness window — which means low-volume sites need smaller, more frequent drops.
Yes. Mineral content directly affects extraction, which is why the same recipe can taste flat in one town and harsh in another.
That's the core of a group account: one profile, per-site delivery scheduling and recipe documentation your managers can hold staff to.
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