Melbourne staff of Pitcher Partners consume almost $1 million worth of coffee

The Melbourne branch of accounting and advisory firm Pitcher Partners has marked International Coffee Day with a breakdown of its annual office consumption, and it’s enough to power Lunar Park.

Led by managing partner Brendan Britten as one of six locations nation-wide, the Melbourne office of Pitcher Partners has a headcount of around 750 staff and 50-odd partners.

Ironically, one the firm’s most recent blog articles written by long-serving partner Nick Bull, who was last year appointed as global head of audit for international affiliate Baker Tilly, begins by asking ‘Where to start productivity improvement?’

While Bull’s suggestion as a first step is to start listening, his colleagues may have already cracked the code. In its last financial year, just shy of 164,000 cups of coffee were brewed in the firm’s Collins Street office in the Docklands, or an average of around 650 per work day and likely double that during the flat-out winter audit season.

As a reminder, it’s worth noting that these figures are of course a far cry from total staff consumption, not taking into account off-site assignments and clients meetings, increased work-from-home trends, and ordinary out-of-office lunch breaks, with a number of highly-rated caffeine-dispensers situated within a block or two. The latter though provides an illustration.

At an average – fast rising – local retail price of $6 per cup, the Pitcher office nozzles pour out almost $1 million worth of street-level espresso per annum, which the firm provides to staff for free. This, Pitcher Partners says (and who would doubt an accountancy’s numbers), is the equivalent of 5,000 AFL reserve entry grand final tickets or 343 weekly metropolitan Myki passes.

Added to the bean-count (with apologies to the purists) is more than 400 litres of milk per week, over a quarter of it almond and other non-dairy options. If ordinary rather than human-fuel, the volume would be enough to stop dreaming and actually drive to the tropics. Meanwhile, the 60 kilograms worth of used Dimattina coffee grounds left over each week is recycled to help power community and employee gardens.

It’s not said whether Pitcher Partners’ other Australian offices also get the perky-perks of free coffee, but back-of-napkin scaling for national headcount more than doubles the annual cups brewed across the country to more than a third of a million.

Note though, this (unaudited) figure isn’t weighted, as data sources suggest that Victorians, despite talking about it most, are out-consumed by their South Aussie peers.