Improve alertness levels
Drinking coffee improves your cognitive ability by stopping the production of adenosine production which is a substance that the brain produces to make your body feel weak and reluctant to work. Caffeine is a strong energizer that helps fight this substance and keeps mental alertness, energy, and endurance levels up.
Improve productivity and unify your team
It’s no secret that coffee unites people and it’s become an ingrained habit in office culture. Having coffee breaks in the workplace has a positive effect on relationships between people and can lead to improvements in productivity.
With this knowledge, let’s take a deeper look at instant coffee.
The difference between granulated and freeze-dried instant coffee
The main difference is in the way the beans are dried. Spray drying creates granulated coffee and is the most commonly used drying process. The liquid coffee extract has a very fine mist of water sprayed over it, causing the small particles to stick together and become large coffee granules. Granulated coffee resembles small balls the same size as coarsely ground coffee.
There is then the freeze-drying process. During this process, the liquid coffee extract is frozen to about minus 40°C and then ground into the required size. The ice is then removed from the frozen particles by a process known as sublimation; which is what happens when the ice crystals are removed from the coffee by slowly increasing the temperature in a high vacuum system. The ice crystals transform directly into gas, and this leaves us with the final freeze-dried coffee.
The comparison between spray-dried and freeze-dried coffee can be split into two important aspects – flavour and aroma. As freeze-dried is a longer process, this means that the natural flavour of the coffee is better preserved compared to spray-dried coffee. The quality of the aroma is protected by the low temperature and gentle drying conditions during the freeze-dried process, and therefore the aroma of the coffee is preserved better compared to the spray-dried process.
Which coffee is best for my workplace?
When it comes to choosing which coffee is best for your office there are a couple of ways you can go about it:
You can base it on flavour, which is an individual, subjective choice and often one left to the person placing the stationery orders.
You could also choose based on quantity, and this means making the decision based on what will provide you with enough coffee to keep your staff going. To help you with this the specialists at Jacob Douwe Egberts have created a guide to help you:
| Jar/Tin size |
Number of cups* |
| 100g |
50 |
| 200g |
100 |
| 400g |
200 |
| 500g |
250 |
| 1kg |
500 |
*based on one teaspoon per cup
Does instant coffee have the same health benefits as ground coffee?
In recent times the benefits of having your daily caffeine fix have been more visible. Some of the health benefits that have been associated with coffee include improved energy levels, increased metabolic rate, helping fight depression, lower the risk of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and stroke, and it doesn’t stop there. People generally associate these things with ground coffee, however, according to this article dietician Melanie Grice says instant coffee has most of the health benefits of ground coffee;
"Instant coffee is literally just 100 percent coffee beans that have been roasted, ground and brewed with water into a liquid, then dehydrated, so it has the same health benefits as ground coffee beans"
Whether you ultimately prefer granulated or freeze-dried instant coffee, OfficeMax has an instant coffee solution that will work for you.
