Milk on Tap for the Café – An Overview of the i-milk Automated Milk Delivery System
Repost from the Artisti Coffee Roasters blog – OCTOBER 27, 2020
We’ve been using the i-milk automated milk delivery system here at Artisti Coffee Roastery for over two years. Luke here at Artisti invented the system along with his partners at i-milk. Most of you who subscribe to our YouTube channel probably would have noticed it in the background in some of our videos. We thought it was probably about time to tell you about it, how it works and why every barista that uses it loves it. Not only does it make their job easier, but it’s also efficient, saves loads of waste with plastic milk bottles as well as reduces wasted milk.
Video Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Artisti YouTube channel. Today we’re going to take a look at the i-milk system.
If you’ve looked at a few of our videos, you would have seen us using it quite a few times, so let me tell you a little more about it. So today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret I wear two shirts to this business. My other shirt is an i-milk shirt, so full disclosure here, guys, I am a co-owner of the i-milk product. It’s a product that I’ve been involved in for many years. I’m the coffee guy behind it.
This thing was made in the back of our espresso bar in the service area many years ago, so this is going to be a little bit biased, but hopefully, you’ll understand why we developed the product; how it’s helping people and just why I think it’s pretty cool and why we love using it here at Artisti, and our customers enjoy using it. We sell it all over the world, so let me get into giving you a good all-around overview of the i-milk system. So what is the i-milk system? It is an automated milk delivery system that will take milk from bladders from your fridge straight to the jug. It takes bottles out of your cafe, and you don’t have to manage to lift up bottles all the time and pour them into your jug, so it’s going to speed up service.
It’s going to keep this workspace so much cleaner and tidier. It will give you the accuracy that there’s just zero wastage, allowing us to have two different kinds of milk coming out of the one spout, your full cream and your light. It will be delivered into the jug how you program that in by specific weight. Hence, it’s a weight-based scale that knows what jug you’re putting on the system and exactly will dispense the amount that you have already pre-programmed in for that jug. It also allows you to have multiple fill levels to have the right amount of milk for a flat white or a cappuccino so that when you pour that out, you have the exact amount of milk and zero wastage.
The other cool thing is it’s a hands-free jug washer as well, so the whole unit works very simply just by placing a jug down; there’s no pressing of buttons, there’s no holding, touching, or whatever it is simply how you place the jug down activates the unit so if I get a small jug like this a 400 mil jug and we’re going to be getting the right amount of milk for a small eight-ounce takeaway or a dining cup we just simply place the jug on the dispenser. It’s going to give us the exact amount that we want for a cappuccino because we need more room in that jug to be able to froth and have the volume for that cup, but a flat white is going to need more milk and less froth so simply, there’s a sensor here.
If you pass, it will give you a top-up, which will be the difference between the foam you’re not going to create when you steam the milk. You’ll have the right amount for your flat white for that same cup if you get another jug size, you can pass the sensor first, and that will then activate the system to pour you light milk so you can use again a bigger size jug which you can have four different jugs and two fill sizes, and if you place it on we’re going to get light milk exactly the same, just in a bigger jug and again a second fill level, so it’s really easy to have the exact amount of milk that you need to be out of froth and pour out the cup you’re about to make so pretty much zero wastage.
So once you finish pouring your lovely latte art, just place the jug upside down. It will automatically wash your jug, so I don’t have to press and hold. It’s allowing me to do something else, like getting an espresso shot on or grabbing the next cup, but I’m about to pour. Hence, there’s a lot of time-saving in this area, not having to play with the bottles, recap bottles, lift them up or jump down the fridge all the time to continually reload my workspace. It also means that we have far fewer milk jugs here that we can swap our almonds and our Soys and keep a neat, tidy, clean workspace. The other cool thing is if you want to re-wash your jug, you simply tap it, so it’s an amazing hands-free innovative system that allows you to place a jug on and go and do something else.
It’s going to save a lot of time, so in between the head unit, we have a pump box, and simply, it allows milk to be sucked in and out from bladders in the fridge and dispensed up to the head unit. We put that in the back of the fridge, so it’s a bit hard to show that, but when we come down here, you’ll start to see how we can manage milk if it doesn’t come in bottles anymore. We do get it in the bladder, and as you can see, it will empty a 10-litre bladder pretty much to empty. You can stack up as many as you like when you need to change two different bladders. You simply pull one of these fittings out, remove the little cap, and you can jam it in again. It’s quite simple, so I’ll just do that now they’re a little bit funny.
Sometimes there’s a different range of caps that come with different brands. Still, most milk suppliers will be able to supply your milk and bladders now in Australia and then you just jam it in. Now that’s reloaded another 10 litres into the system. It doesn’t matter how many 10-litre bladders you want to connect. We can just simply keep stacking them up.
The biggest we’ve done is 800 litres, which gets used daily, and it goes down to three different um coffee stations with the different i-milk in place. This is our full cream here, but it is also on the other side. We’d have our skim milk, so again, you can continue to have as much as you like plugged in. You can run it with either one bag or 10 20 30, whatever you like. There’s no limit, and it will continue to draw down the stack as you go. When you’re finished at the end of the day, you can simply put a manual tap into this bag and take the milk out so you can clean the system and still serve. It allows you to take these fittings to drop them into a bucket.
We just suck the chemical up through the head unit up into the dispenser, and it takes six minutes, and the system’s clean and ready to go for the next day, so there’s not a lot to do. Loading bladders in is very simple, allowing you to get a good amount of milk in your fridge. To generalize note for you here if you’ve got a closed fridge. Your fridge will work far better because you’re not opening and closing it all the time, so it will be more efficient for you to run a fridge. In this scenario, we’ve had it here for two years, and the guys have had no problems with it. It speeds up their service, and they love using it every day, but obviously, there’s always the next best product moving forward.
So what does the future hold for eye milk well, at the moment, I know there is a few products out there that will heat and froth your milk, so stay tuned! I know we’re very close to having a product. You’ll see it first here through our channel, so thanks for watching hope you enjoyed understanding a bit more about eye milk and our business, and if you’ve got any more questions, make sure you check out our i-milk website, our Instagram page, and youtube channel, which is going to give you a lot more insight as to how the system works and why we love it!
So thanks very much for watching, guys, have an awesome day. We’ll catch you soon.
