Anyone who has visited Minsmere's cafe will know how delicious our cakes, scones and meals are, but have you ever wondered how many cups of tea we sell every day?
Well, here's some numbers that help to shed light on what a wonderful job our catering team do every day.
During the year ending 31 March 2017, we sold an incredible 34774 cups or mugs of tea. That works out at about 95 cups per day. Allowing for seasonal differences, that means that on some days we probably make more than 200 cups of tea.
Of course, many visitors prefer coffee, and during the same period we sold 8306 Lattes, 8707 Americanos and 6793 Cappucinos, as well as 16239 filter coffees. That's 50225 mugs of coffee in total, or 138 per day. Whoever said that we're nation of tea drinkers!
Add in 4193 hot chocolates and that comes to more than 89 000 hot drinks in a year, or 245 per day. Assuming that the average cup is about half a pint, that's almost 45000 pints, which works out at close to 10000 litres per year.
If those figures sound impressive, how about 16678 scones eaten in a year (sadly I don't have a breakdown between cheese and fruit scones)! That works out at 46 scones per day. However, since scones sales generally reflect visitor numbers, simply averaging sales doesn't really reflect how busy the catering team are. In May, for example, we sold 1679 scones, which is about 64 per day, while the busiest single week accounted for 574 scones - an impressive 82 per day. As all our scones are handmade in the kitchen, that's a pretty impressive total.
(photo by John Chapman)
Our lovely volunteer who calculated these figures for me wasn't able to give a breakdown of the number of cakes sold since the spreadsheet used lumps many of them under the smae heading, but suffice to say it will be lots. She was, however, to tell me that we also sold 3232 bacon rolls last year. Now, I know I can account for several of these (and indeed a good few scones), but since bacon rolls are mainly sold before 11 am, that's not bad either.
All of this talk of food makes we think that I should have included a cheese scone as one of the 70 species to spot. Never mind, they'll just have to remain one of the bonuses of a visit to Minsmere