The “Cost of Living Crisis” is painful for most of us. With the inflation rate pushing 10% prices for most things we buy are rising quickly, but our pay packets aren’t keeping pace.

Here at Re-Caffeinated we thought it might be useful to look at how much your daily takeaway coffee habit may be costing you on an annual basis. Could it make more financial sense to buy your own specialty coffee-making machine?

Takeaway Coffee Costs Quickly Mount Up

Buying a speciality coffee every working day from your local coffee shop or somewhere else on your journey to work is something most of us do out of habit. You’re probably spending between £2.50 and £3.50 per cup every time you pop in to get your coffee. At the time of writing the average price of a takeaway coffee in the UK is £2.80.

The cost soon mounts up – if you’re buying a takeaway coffee every working day you’ll be spending around £728 each year - a lot of money in these challenging times. Over 3 years, the cost rises to a rather scary £2,184, without allowing for inflation.

Ever Thought About Buying a Specialty Coffee Machine?

We’d like to make the case for investing in a specialty coffee machine – for purposes of comparison we’ve chosen the Jura E8, which is all the coffee machine most of us will ever need. Think of it as the “VW Golf of coffee machines.” It retails at around £1,100 in the UK.

Cost Analysis: Jura E8 vs. Daily Takeaway Coffee

We’ve already looked at how much a daily takeaway coffee costs on an annual basis. But how does this compare with buying a Jura E8, grinding your own coffee beans, and factoring in other costs - electricity, milk, water, and maintenance of the machine?

To do this, we’ve made a few usage assumptions:

Coffee beans: a Jura E8 can grind between 5g. and 16g. of coffee beans per drink, depending on your personal settings, so let’s assume 10g. of beans ground per cup. A 1kg. bag of beans will therefore produce 100 drinks. If a bag of quality beans costs £20 a bag, that’s 20p per cup.

Milk/Sugar/Water: you’ll have to work out your own consumption of these, but it’s probably going to be less than the cost of the beans. For milk, we estimate about 9p to 10p per cappuccino.

Electricity: a Jura E8, in use for 20 minutes per day, which allows for 4 or more cappuccinos to be made from cold, would consume £33.24 of electricity per annum at current prices, or around 2p per cup.

Maintenance Costs: the Jura machine will require a filter change depending on how many drinks are produced and how hard your water is, so that’s a little tricky to accurately forecast, but, as a filter will usually last between 1 and 3 months, let’s assume 1 filter every 45 days. If you drink 3 cups per day you would have consumed 135 cups in 45 days, so for this example we’ll divide the filter cost of £13 by 135 cups giving us 9p per cup. A clean of the machine will be required approximately every 200 cups. 3-stage Jura cleaning tablets are about £1.60 per tablet, if purchasing a tub of 25, so 0.8 of a pence per cup; let’s round that up to 1p per cup. If you make milk-based speciality drinks you should use the milk cleaner at the end of each day. A 180g tub of milk cleaning granules costs £8.40 and gives approx. 60 cleans, so that would be 14p per cup.

Our calculations suggest that the cost of coffee beans, electricity and maintenance is going to work out at around 56p per cup. You just need to work out your own water and sugar costs and add these – but they would need to exceed £2.24 per day to get close to the cost of takeaway coffee!!

Buying a Jura E8 – It’s a No-Brainer!

The Jura E8 with Jura accessories - cool control & cup warmer

 

A brand new Jura E8 coffee machine will set you back around £1,100. If you buy 1 cup of coffee from your favourite coffee outlet for 5 days a week at £2.80 per cup, in 2 years you would have spent £1,456 (on 520 cups of coffee). With a Jura E8 machine your cost per cup of coffee would work out at around £1.41 per cup (plus your water/sugar). This calculation includes the depreciation of the machine based on a 5 year lifespan. But bear in mind Jura machines will last for many years! In our experience, most Jura machines will easily last 10 years if they’re well-maintained, so your cost per cup should actually work out considerably lower.

So next time you’re standing in line waiting for a takeaway coffee, think about the money you could be saving by investing in your own Jura E8 coffee machine. When you have your own machine you never need to wait in line, you can grind any coffee beans that take your fancy and you and your family can drink as many cups as you like!