So you’re ramping up your beverage offer. Got yourself a bank of state-of-the-art coffee brewers, some new cappuccino machines, a 24-head soda fountain with two types of ice. You launched a new coffee menu with a proprietary brew and even a Fair Trade option.
So what’d you do to treat your water? Oh, nothing? Well, good luck with those new offerings; you’ll be dealing with inefficient equipment and funky tastes in no time.
John Notte, coffee and fountain category manager for Sheetz, noticed a change in the coffee in stores near the company’s Altoona, Pa., headquarters. He called the city’s water treatment office and, sure enough, he found out there had been a drop in mineral content. “He started laughing: ‘Of all the things we’ve done, I never thought I’d get a call saying Sheetz coffee tastes different,’ ” Notte says.
Whether it’s in a recipe or a coffee machine, water is a critical ingredient in all consumables. Just as you wouldn’t use subpar beans in your brew or syrup in your soda, the water flowing into your stores should be treated for optimal performance.
But there’s a lot of science involved in a glass of water—let alone the process of treating it. Before determining what treatment system your stores need, understand what’s happening when the water starts to flow.
A Look Under the Hood
For c-stores, water treatment is most crucial to the insides of coffee, iced tea, fountain and ice machines, as well as steam ovens, for those who use them. But water affects each machine and product differently.
Flavor is an important factor, largely affected by the characteristics of a city or region’s water supply. Meanwhile, temperature—in both freezing and heating the water—can affect what that water to the inside of a piece of equipment, causing heating inefficiencies and equipment breakdown.
- Fountain: Because you aren’t heating or freezing the water in a fountain machine, the biggest concern here is taste, caused by dirt and sediment as well as any chemicals added at the water-treatment plant to make the water safe to drink.
“Commonly found chemicals in water, chlorine and/or chloramines, can negatively impact the taste of the finished product,” says Daniel Schmidt, business development manager for the VIZION water-treatment brand from A.J. Antunes & Co., Carol Stream, Ill. “In some cases, high levels of certain chemicals can also damage or corrode equipment.”
Chlorine and other elements can also cause poor carbonation, making the beverage go flat.
- Coffee: Three issues affect coffee quality and machine efficiency. When it comes to taste, it’s all about the mineral content of the water. If your water supply is very high in mineral content, not enough oil will be extracted from the grounds, resulting in weak or flat flavor. Low mineral content results in too much extraction. The result: a bitter, oily brew.
“You have to have that balance between too little and too much mineral,” says Roy Parker, global senior marketing manager, foodservice, for Pentair Process Technologies, Hanover Park, Ill., which manufactures the Everpure water treatment brand.
Chlorine is also an issue for coffee. Most water-treatment facilities use chlorine, which bonds with the organics in the water to create that swimming-pool smell—not a particularly favorable flavor pairing with a customer’s French vanilla creamer.
And then there’s scale, the biggest culprit, which occurs when the water is heated and “dissolved hardness minerals in the water come out of suspension,” explains Schmidt. “The minerals attach to heating elements inside of boilers or pipes/lines and negatively affect the efficiency of heating elements and potentially restrict water flow.”
However, those hardness minerals are also an important contributor to the taste of the coffee. “If all hardness minerals are removed, the coffee would taste astringent,” says Schmidt. “As a result, we need to have a ‘healthy’ balance of hardness minerals in the water.” The industry standard, he says, is three to six grains per gallon.
- Iced Tea: Whether you’re brewing iced tea or using a concentrate will determine the effects of water on the final product. Regardless, “because tea doesn’t have as strong a flavor and color as coffee … it’s even more susceptible to changes in flavor,” says Parker.
Brewed tea faces pitfalls similar to those of coffee: scale buildup due to heating. Tea’s transparency also makes it prone to the cloudiness imparted by that pesky hardness mineral, calcium magnesium. When heated, calcium magnesium bonds with the organics and creates a cloudy, dark color, says Parker.
Tea that comes from concentrate doesn’t face the issues of cloudiness or scale buildup. But, as with fountain drinks, the taste can be affected by chlorine, chloramines and organics in the water.
- Ice Machines: The sheer amount of water flowing through an ice machine is what causes issues for the pieces inside. For traditional cuber machines, the biggest culprit is high mineral content. Like its friends in the coffee machine, the mineral content of water in an ice machine is affected by changes in temperature. It builds up on the evaporator plate (called freeze up), causing the water to stick and freeze and refreeze, making for inefficiency and misshapen ice.
- Steam Ovens: Cooking/holding equipment that involves steam is especially susceptible to bad water. “It’s taking water and converting it to steam, which means all the mineral that’s in there is going to fall out of the solution and stick somewhere, usually inside the boiler or the cavity where the food is steamed,” says Parker.
One-quarter-inch of scale buildup in a steam oven can increase energy consumption by 38%. What’s more, chlorine in the water can turn to hydrochloric acid in the heat, which will pit and destroy the components. The first sign of corrosion from chlorine is rust on the grates, which is typically made with a lesser-quality metal than the cabinet.
Finding the Source
Now that you’re burdened with the knowledge of what water is doing to your equipment and beverages, how do you go about treating it?
One example: A local dealer can come to test the water using dip strips and meters. For retailers with the luxury of time, a sample can be sent to a lab for a very specific rundown of what’s in the water.
The dealer surveys the equipment in the store and space available for filtration to determine whether all the beverage machines can feed off one system. Or, if space is an issue, point-of-use filters can be placed on each piece of equipment.
From there, the retailer works with the manufacturer to create the proper system based on hot- and cold-water needs, as well as the nuances of the area’s water makeup.
San Antonio-based c-store chain TETCO recently initiated a test at two sites to see if a water-treatment system would be more efficient and economical than using inline filters.
“Inline filters were costly and, due to water at those locations, these were being changed out frequently,” says Manuel Escobar, foodservice category manager for the 756-store chain.
Though the company is still in the evaluation phase, “it seems that equipment maintenance is down, plus the savings in the costly filters,” says Escobar.
Along with price, Escobar has cited better-tasting beverages, and is considering whether the filtration system offers point of differentiation worth marketing to customers at the beverage station.
The regionality of water is particularly important for chains with stores in various cities, states and regions. Seattle and parts of New York have naturally soft water, and retailers there likely won’t need scale treatment, says Parker of Everpure. In Texas and parts of Florida, meanwhile, “you have hardness through the roof.” In Hawaii, silica is an issue due to volcanic rock and soil, while areas that source water from lakes or rivers face high organics that aren’t taken out by water treatment plants and can change seasonally.
“If every water was like [the Pittsburgh market], we wouldn’t have to do a thing, but unfortunately it’s not,” says Notte of Sheetz.
With stores in six states, Sheetz has many different water treatment systems in place. For new builds, the company’s construction team will conduct an analysis that guides what type of system is put in. Most often stores have a complete system vs. point-of-service filters.
“For people who install beverage equipment without filtration equipment—or without the right filtration equipment—it is a disaster,” he says.
Many specialty coffee chains and some QSRs have implemented the costly process of reverse osmosis in stores. It strips the water of everything, then blends minerals back in to reach the operators’ optimal flavor. In some Sheetz stores—the exceptions, not the norm, says Notte—the water is so hard, the company has implemented a blended reverse osmosis system. Other areas have no mineral content, so minerals need to be added in for the proper flavor.
Other retailers may consider using ion exchange, or water softening, to deal with hard water. The issue there is that some of the sodium will end up in the final product—particularly unappealing in ice, which will come out soft. Further, ion exchange doesn’t filter the water, so a filter would still be needed to take out any chemicals.
Bottom line: Work with the manufacturer to build the proper system for each store, one by one.
The Real Problem
Once a water treatment system is in place, the work has just begun. The biggest mistake a retailer can make when maintaining a store’s water treatment system, says Schmidt, is nothing at all. And nothing happens a lot. Filters need to be changed on a timely basis or you run the risk of damaging equipment, resulting in operational breakdowns or maintenance issues, as well as serving substandard beverages.
“If the filters are not changed when they are supposed to … the system is now a waste of money. Change your filters,” says Ryan White, foodservice category manager for Tri Star Energy, Nashville, Tenn.
Tri Star, which operates under the Daily’s, Twice Daily’s and Daily’s Express banners, is implementing water-treatment systems in all new builds. Consistency of product was a key priority in the decision. “You should be able to go to any site and the Coke should taste like Coke, not like well water and Coke,” White says.
Depending on the system and manufacturer, a retailer can either schedule a service person to change filters, or assign a staff member to own the task. Tri Star handles filter replacement internally by the maintenance department. White recommends writing the replacement date directly on the filters for easy reference.
Meanwhile, Escobar of TETCO has found that moving to a storewide system vs. inline filters has allowed for more consistency in filter changes with centralized record keeping.
Another pitfall retailers find themselves in is when they want to add new equipment. Call your water-treatment partner to determine whether you can add to the existing system or if you need to add a filter at the point of use. Don’t assume you can plumb in; depending on the capacity, it can be hard on the filtration and plumbing system.
And when you’re building or remodeling a store, consider what you might want to do in the future. Then oversize the system or design it to be expanded so future customers can also drink and eat with ease.
Equipment Innovations
If you don’t already have a water-treatment system in place or are looking to upgrade, some new systems have entered the market that make treating water more efficient and effective.
VIZION by A.J. Antunes & Co.’s water treatment consists of two parts: First, the VZN system removes turbidity and sediment, and off tastes due to chemicals and organic matter that affect the taste of the final product. Then, the MAVEA system removes carbonate hardness minerals that cause scale buildup in equipment in which water is heated. Of course, some level of mineral is needed to yield a quality flavor, and the MAVEA Intelli-Bypass technology allows retailers’ desired hardness level to be set.
Everpure, meanwhile, is launching its Simpliflow system this fall. Especially useful for new builds, the system tracks all water through a store using a valve system. Everything is labeled to help retailers keep track of all water lines.
Keeping Ice Safe
Besides “off” tastes and freeze up, even more sinister elements are lurking in ice machines. But a new technology from Franke Foodservice Systems simplifies ice-machine cleaning routines while better preventing the spread of harmful bacteria and pathogens.
The device, when attached to the ice-machine water line, creates precise levels of dissolved ozone to safely sanitize the ice-making path and holding bin without chemicals. Ozone has been proven to prevent the growth of bacteria such as E. coli by more than 99.99%, according to the company.
Past systems using ozone used either too much or too little, rendering it either unsafe or ineffective. But Franke’s new system has been received with strong accolades, including a Kitchen Innovations award at the 2012 National Restaurant Association show.
Both Scotsman, Vernon Hills, Ill., and Ice-O-Matic, Denver, have partnered with Franke to make the device available on new machines, as well as retrofits for existing machines. Scotsman will be the exclusive distributor beyond Franke’s core foodservice customers.
“The Franke system provides a highly effective and affordable way to cut the cost and hassle of keeping ice machines clean, significantly extending the interval between cleaning and helping prevent the spread of harmful bacteria and pathogens in ice,” says Terry Toth, communications manager for Scotsman.
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