If you want long-term, loyal customers who visit your drive-thru daily and rave about you to their friends and coworkers, you need to prioritize drink presentation.

You might not realize that messy whipped cream can be the enemy of good drink presentation, and if your baristas are handing off drinks with whipped cream that touches the inside of the lid or expands outside of the lid, your customers are merely be tolerating an undesirable aesthetic experience. Even if they don’t say anything to you, sloppy drinks and messy whipped cream will contribute to a diminished experience with your brand.

What is drink presentation? What makes drink presentation appealing?

Put simply, drink presentation is how your drinks look to your customers. A drink is either aesthetically pleasing or not. What makes a drink aesthetically pleasing is not just the color. You also need to consider the whipped cream, and most importantly, the absence of a mess.

Avoiding messy cups might seem challenging to achieve in a drive-thru setting since when your baristas are rushing to make drinks quickly in a small space. However, with a little attention, it’s not as hard as it seems. And where drink aesthetics are concerned, it seems like you have no control. After all, you can’t impress drive-thru customers with amazing latte art in a ceramic demitasse.

So, what can you do? Well, creating drinks with an appealing presentation is more about avoiding things that create a messy presentation. Sure, chocolate marbling down the side of a cup looks great, and that’s a great way to present blended drinks made with chocolate. However, skipping that drizzle won’t hurt you as much as handing out drinks with sloppy whipped cream.

Use whipped cream intentionally for better drink presentation

The first thing to crack down on (yes, I said “crack down”) is the abuse of whipped cream. If you don’t have a set amount of whipped cream that goes on each drink, you aren’t controlling your costs tightly enough. Worse, your baristas are wasting a ton of product by being overly generous with whipped cream. In addition to wasting money, this habit diminishes the presentation of your drinks, which will hurt your brand image, even if just on a subconscious level.

For example, unless you train them otherwise, baristas tend to fill dome lids completely with whipped cream. This makes the whipped cream look flat rather than textured. Whipped cream is designed to be an aesthetically-pleasing topping, not a main dish to be mindlessly gulped down. The nozzle is notched in order to create texture as the whipped cream comes out of the can. When your drinks come with a small topping of textured whipped cream, it’s more visually pleasing than a giant flat white blob.

The key to making whipped cream look good on top of cold coffee is to dispense it in a slow circle, keeping the majority of it in the center of the drink. It should also never touch the lid. Both hot and cold lids are domed to accommodate whipped cream. When whipped cream touches the lid (on cold drinks) it looks messy.

For example, watch this barista fill a dome lid with whipped cream. The customer is probably happy to get so much cream, but it diminishes the drink’s presentation; the cream’s texture is completely lost.

Now, check out this picture of coffee topped with whipped cream. You can see the texture of the whipped cream and it looks so much better. When you take this approach to whipped cream, you can add more things that boost the presentation, like chocolate drizzle, sprinkles, or anything else your customers would enjoy.

Don’t let your baristas get creative with whip

There’s nothing wrong with giving customers what they want, including extra whipped cream, as long as they’re willing to pay for it. The problem is when your baristas feel like they have endless creative freedom to use whipped cream however they want. If your drink recipe presentation doesn’t include a set amount of whipped cream, most of your baristas will go overboard.

Wasted whipped cream is completely preventable by making the amount, size, and style of your whipped cream topping part of the recipe and official presentation of your drinks. All you have to do is create a standard for how you want the whipped cream to look on hot and cold drinks, train your baristas to follow the standard, and correct it just like you would any other recipe mistake.

Don’t give your baristas whipped cream freedom

It might sound petty, but never give your baristas the freedom to dispense whipped cream at their leisure. Not only will it cost you money and kill your drink presentation, but you won’t be able to get them to stop without a major fight. Baristas tend to be proud of their whipped cream creations, and will take it personally when you ask them to change their ways.

Several years ago, I drove through the shop where I had previously worked for about ten years and was shocked to see how far downhill it had gone. I ordered a blended white chocolate mocha with whipped cream, and she handed me a mess. The coffee had spilled down the side of the cup and was dripping into my lap; the dome lid was filled to the top and spilling over with whipped cream; there was a pile of whipped cream on top of the lid around the base of the straw, and she covered the entire straw with a vertical wall of even more whipped cream that was actively sliding down into my lap.

I remembered this whipped cream trick. Just before I quit many years prior, the latest batch of high schoolers had invented this “all over whipped cream” aesthetic, and apparently it stuck even all those years later.

I quickly gulped down as much whipped cream from the straw as I could before it melted, but some of it fell in my lap and I ended up with whipped cream all over my face. I wasn’t trying to enjoy the whipped cream; this was a recon mission, an attempt to prevent a mess in my lap and car. I managed to get most of the whipped cream, but it left my straw and lid too sticky to touch. If I tried to drink it while I was driving, my steering wheel would get sticky, so I waited until I got home and my drink was pretty melted at that point. I never told them – I just never went back. You see, the new owners didn’t care about presentation, either. They wanted a hands-off business and let the baristas do whatever they wanted. Oddly, they didn’t seem concerned about the lack of customers and chalked it up to “the economy.”

If you don’t set presentation standards for whipped cream, I guarantee some of your baristas are doing crazy things with whipped cream, and it’s annoying your customers.

Most customers don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and since baristas get excited when they make drinks this way, most customers won’t protest. Instead, they’ll either ask for no whipped cream to avoid the issue, or they’ll start visiting another coffee shop and you’ll lose their business.

If that same incident happened when I worked under corporate, that barista would have been given one warning, and if it happened again, she would have been fired. Most people would think that’s harsh, but you can’t have it both ways. You can either run a profitable, well-oiled drive-thru coffee shop machine, or you can let your baristas run the show and go bankrupt.

If you allow your baristas to go crazy with whipped cream, good luck trying to get them to stop. They will fight you the whole way and start drama by trash talking you to the rest of the team. It’s better to be strict from the start and avoid this situation entirely. The last thing you want to do is argue with employees over why they need to follow new drink standards after you’ve allowed them free reign for so long.

Overflowing whipped cream isn’t a deal breaker

If you’re worried about losing customers for not filling up dome lids, don’t worry. First of all, if you’re not in the business of selling whipped cream. There is more to a customer’s experience than whipped cream. And just because a lot of coffee shops fill their dome lids to the brim doesn’t mean that’s what customers want, and it certainly doesn’t mean if you don’t do it you’ll lose customers. Most customers are happy with a normal amount of whipped cream, but will take whatever you’re willing to give them. However, very few will go out of their way to request a dome lid filled with whipped cream if that’s not how the drink is made. I was a barista for 15 years and only about four people ever requested a filled dome lid on a regular basis.

In other words, scaling back on the whipped cream is not a deal-breaker. If a customer leaves because you won’t give them a quarter can of whipped cream on their drink for free, do yourself a favor and let them go.

Presentation impacts taste

When your iced and blended drinks look like a delicacy, it can influence the way your customers experience taste. Many studies have been done that show how perception influences taste, and people report enjoying food more when it’s served with an aesthetically-pleasing presentation.

Humans are predominantly visual and what we see overrides our other senses. When your drink presentation looks amazing, customers will find that it tastes better. If someone wants more whipped cream, of course it’s okay to give them more whipped cream. However, don’t make poor drink presentation your standard. Set yourself apart from your competitors and start fine-tuning how you present your drinks with visible whipped cream. Your drinks will be consistent, you’ll save a lot of money, and your customers will be happier.