MILAN — Offices are the coffee houses of tomorrow. This development is bringing changes for company food service with it and thus also new business potential for the vending industry.
Burkart Schmid, Chief Editor of the gv-praxis, recently reported in a comment in the business magazine foodservice (12.02.2019): “A revolution is currently taking place in our world of work. The empty job market and a record high of over 45 million employed in our country are accelerating the employer’s approach of allowing more freedom and flexibility at the workplace. As such they are accommodating the I-wishes of the Y and Z generations.”
Stefanie Mauritz, Director euvend & coffeena, also sees potential here: “We already discovered the growth market Office Coffee Services (OCS) for the trade fair while we were doing the preparations for euvend & coffeena 2017. We took the first steps at the time with an Office Coffee Corner concept.
Here, the companies were able to present their OCS solutions. Over the past two years, the idea of the Coffee Corner has undergone constant further development. For euvend & coffeena 2019 an Office Lounge initially formed the basis of the planning. This project has been continually further developed due to the rapid changes in the world of work.”
It is no longer about separate rooms where meals are eaten or prepared in the breaks. Keywords like coworking spaces, communication zones, work environments, lounges, work culture, digitalisation, shared spaces are the talk of the town. Separate rooms or different zones are merging together more and more and are being equipped with beverage and snack offers. As a result, totally new possibilities for an exchange and collaboration are being created. The future of work is self-determined,” was the headline by Design Offices GmbH which promises: “For a creative exchange over a coffee one meets up in the spacious coworking lounge that displays a loft character.”
euvend & coffeena 2019 is picking up on these trends and developments and is also making them directly tangible for the trade visitor in the scope of the new “Office Coworking Lab”. Here the Office Lounge, Coworking Space and Students Lab come together. Company food service and vending meet up with the new world of work and junior employees in a creative work environment with a coworking lounge/loft character. What does this mean in concrete terms?
Students and young trainees will work in the Office Coworking Lab – i.e. in a kind of coworking space equipped with vending offers – on projects that were defined by the industry in advance. The visitors of euvend & coffeena can look over the shoulders of the industry’s young employees. The tasks addressed can for instance derive from the sections marketing and sales, international marketing, design, communications and PR, architecture and technology. A larger group of students from the Netherlands has already confirmed its participation.
