The Barista Training Program

The program aims to cultivate talented employees with expertise in coffee and build up a knowledge sharing portal on coffee for our retail stores. This is a 2-day training of coffee testing, coffee beans production, terminology, brewing skills, and courses on management, marketing and promotion skills. Trainees passed the final examination would be certified as ‘Coffee Master. ‘Coffee Masters’ are responsible to transmit coffee knowledge and marketing skills to retail stores with potential in coffee market. PCSC expects that the Barista Training Program will improve employees’ identification with the CITY CAFE (private brand of PCSC’s fresh brew coffee product), their responsibility to the brand, and cultivate professional skills in coffee brewing and marketing in order to provide good taste of coffee and warm experience to our customers. We also expect that the training program will help to increase daily sales of coffee per store. As of 2022, there are 277 certified Coffee Masters and FTEs of participating employees accounted for 3.93% of all employee FTEs. They are able to help to improve coffee quality and product marketing around PCSC’s retail stores. After consulting with master baristas, the average annual coffee revenue of these stores increased by 8.5% compared with the national average annual coffee revenue in 2022. The annual revenue of each store with certified master baristas, experts or stores that received their assistance increased by 6.8%.

The Fresh Food Guidance Improvement Program

The program aims to strengthen district consultants’ capacity in terms of fresh food ordering to further the stores’ management of fresh food products , as well as improving their decision-making ability for solving the stores’ problems. We further combined the courses with on-site demonstrations to help the district consultants determine the problems and opportunities through lectures and practical exercises in the stores to improve the stores’operational efficiency. We hopes to boost the professional guidance capacity of the district consultants in the selection, ordering, display, sales, shortage and scrap reduction of fresh food products to assist the stores with potential problems and difficulties in terms of fresh food products. We also expect that the training program will help decrease the quarterly scrap rate and amount of fresh food per store. A total of 274 district consultants passed the test in 2022 and FTEs of participating employees accounted for 11.96% of all employee FTEs, as well as applying the knowledge and enhanced abilities they acquired while giving guidance to the stores in terms of fresh food products. The trainees offered the stores guidance upon completing the training in 2022 by observing the ordering process and store display as well as discussing any potential issues with the store staff. They assisted the stores in evaluating the actual sales and providing advice for ordering. In the first quarter of 2023, the scrap rate of fresh food in stores that have been guided by the trainees was 6.2% with a 13.9% decrease compared with the same period the year before (7.2%).

Standard human capital return on investment

(note) The information above includes PCSC and its subsidiaries.