Heat Shield

It’s an age-old to go problem, how to serve a hot beverage in a disposable cup without your customers turning their fingers into blisters. Millions of dollars and thousands of lives have been lost in the search for the answer. Well, maybe not thousands of lives but you get the idea. The coffee industry and paper manufacturers alike are constantly reviewing and revising the materials that separate our delicate appendages from the cauldron of perfectly brewed elixir within.

The first and most obvious, yet costly approach is to simply double cup the beverage. This presents a couple of problems, however. First, the owner of the café will have an aneurism when he sees the amount of money he’s spending on extra cups going out the door unfilled. Trying to drink from a lidless, double-cupped beverage is an experimentation in dribbleology. I know that’s not a real word but it conveys the message, it’s messy. Even if you have a lid on said cup(s) it’s still, well, downright wasteful. And for all you global warming worrywarts out there, that’s not good.

1993
Coffee-cup sleeve
Jay Sorensen, Inventor

Spill a scalding cup of coffee into your lap, and you have two ways to get rich: (a) sue McDonald's, or (b) invent a product that could save millions from the same fate. Reluctant realtor Jay Sorensen chose (b) after suffering a dousing in 1991. Two years later, he unveiled the Java Jacket, an insulating sleeve made from waffle-textured cardboard that wraps around a standard paper cup. Starbucks later launched a similar product, provoking a legal wrangle, but Sorensen's family-run company has prospered by focusing on independent coffeehouses and chains, which have snapped up more than 600 million Java Jackets.

To elaborate, Sorensen says he used to go through a Portland, Oregon drive-thru where the operator would hand him a cup of coffee with a napkin wrapped around it. In my mind I’m envisioning a slow motion sequence. The cup is handed out the window as the orchestral theme from “Platoon” (Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings) plays in the background. He pulls away holding his cup and shifting until, in a horrifying instant, the napkin-clad cup slips away from the from his grasp, plummeting to his lap below. OK, overly dramatic. Still, it led him to invent the pop-top of the coffee world. He says that the standard Java Jacket can drop the exterior temperature of a cup of 185˚F beverage down to 152˚-156˚F.

During my tenure at a silly doughnut chain, I performed some research on the cups we were using because we were getting complaints from customers that the exterior temperature was too hot. Using an infrared thermometer, we measured the exterior temps at around 165˚-168˚F. This represents a full ten degrees above the window of acceptability from Sorensen’s work. The folks complaining were mostly older people whose hands couldn’t take higher exterior temperatures. You see, the center of your palm is one of the more sensitive parts of your body. The maximum amount of temperature it can withstand is approximately 160˚F which is why pro baristas are taught to gauge the temperature of the milk they steam with their palms instead of with a thermometer (another article). The end result is that your fingers being more often used than the center of your palm should be able to take slightly higher temperatures. The silly doughnut chain never solved the problem.

Coffee people not being ones to wait around for manufacturers to tell them what to do began to brand the sleeves for marketing their cafes.

Dave’s money saving tip:

1. Buy plain white hot cups and blank coffee sleeves.
2. Also buy a durable rubber stamp with your logo on it and some stamp ink.
3. Have your staff stamp the sleeves with the logo.

Keeps the kids busy and doesn’t cost that much. On the other hand if you want to have a more professional look for your cup sleeves there are answers.

BrightVision, a San Francisco based company specializes in custom prints for coffee sleeves that help brand and market your business. You can choose from plain brown cardboard or white, pre-printed art or customize your own. Don Scherer, Vice President of Custom Printing says that the sleeves they print go way beyond simple function. Branding of the business, promotion of specials and sales which generate repeat business, Scherer says, are two of the creative ways that custom sleeve printing benefits the independent shop.

Ted Alpert of Double Wrap Cup and Container Company stressed being green in the manufacturing of his coffee sleeves. The 14 year old company makes their sleeves with a high percentage of recycled material. They fit all popular sizes and even fit vending machine cups. The sleeves are translucent enough to allow logos and promotional advertising on the cup to be visible. I’ve tried these and they are very simple and really work well.

It serves your best interest to both effectively promote your business and keep your customers’ hand out of the hospital. The choices of sleeves go way beyond the list here. Check out the industry you’re in and take advantage of the wealth of imagination at work.