The Weekly Grind: AI & Tech News for Cafe Owners - 07 September 2026
Every week, we round up the most interesting AI and technology news that matters for independent cafe and coffee shop owners. No jargon, no hype - just what you need to know and why it matters for your business.
It is the first Monday of September, three weeks ahead of the fortnight in which the rent quarter and the VAT bill from your best quarter arrive together, and this week's edition is about the document behind the headline. The government named nearly 660 employers for underpaying the minimum wage, and the spreadsheet it published alongside the press release lets you count how many of them underpaid ten workers or fewer. A commencement order signed on Tuesday fixes the date from which someone who used to work for you gets six months, not three, to bring most tribunal claims, and its own table says, claim by claim, which date decides whether you get the old limit or the new one. A US till company published a survey in which 87% of small operators say they are comfortable with AI, and the number that matters is further down: fewer than one in five are trying it without a vendor in the room. A £10m grant scheme launched with cafes in the headline, and the January release it grew out of shows it started life as pub-only money. And the Met Office put a number on how often to expect a summer like the one that has just ended. In every case the headline is true and the document underneath it is more useful. This is the more useful part.
658 Employers Were Named for Underpaying the Minimum Wage on Thursday - 148 Are Hospitality, 98 of Those Owed Money to Ten Workers or Fewer, and Nationally the Two Commonest Causes Are Deductions and Unpaid Working Time
On Thursday 3 September the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade published Round 24 of the National Minimum Wage naming scheme. The release headline says "nearly 660"; the educational bulletin says 658, and the spreadsheet published with it runs to exactly 658 rows. Around £4 million has been returned to more than 27,000 workers, and £7 million in penalties issued. It is the first naming round since the Fair Work Agency was set up in April. Kate Dearden, Minister for the Future of Work: "Underpaying your staff is illegal, and we will not let workers foot the bill for their boss failing to follow the rules." And, more usefully: "Every employer should check their payroll now and reach out to Acas if they need further support." Matthew Taylor, who chairs the Fair Work Agency's advisory board, called the round "an important reminder that paying the minimum wage is not optional", and added: "We are urging all employers to check their payroll, review their processes and correct any mistakes now, so every worker receives the pay they are entitled to." B&Q tops the list, at £456,934.72 owed to 4,530 workers. The hospitality names the trade press led on were Five Guys, at £54,642.47 owed to 3,699 workers, whose statement, carried by The Caterer, said "technical differences in how payroll regulations were applied affected our national minimum wage calculations, resulting in a shortfall of approximately £55,000 across a payroll of more than £330m", and Whitbread, at £4,193.39 owed to 342 workers, which called it an administrative error. Two McDonald's franchisees and a KFC in Brentford are on the list too, and so is a Domino's franchisee, though the spreadsheet files that one under retail rather than hospitality.
The published list is where the story is, and the government did not publish a sector breakdown, so what follows is our own count of the 658-row spreadsheet. It reconciles to the release: £4,246,021.57 across 27,617 workers. Hospitality is the largest of the low-paying sectors on the list, with 148 employers, against 102 in retail, 45 in social care and 44 in leisure. Those 148 owed £402,311.59 to 7,228 workers, an average of £55.66 a head. 115 of them are food and drink businesses: 52 licensed restaurants, 26 unlicensed restaurants and cafes, 15 pubs and bars, 15 takeaways, and seven more split between other food services, event catering and a licensed club. And the notices are small. 98 of the 148 had ten or fewer workers on the notice, 33 involved a single person, 54 owed under £1,000, and the median bill across the 115 food and drink businesses was £1,430.03. Of the 26 unlicensed restaurants and cafes, most are small owner-run businesses, but at least nine are franchised sites of national brands: two McDonald's, a KFC, a Taco Bell, two Creams Cafes, a Kaspa's, a Pepe's and a Morley's. A coffee house in Armagh is on the list for £734.51 owed to one worker; a cafe in Nottingham for £503.15 owed to five; a cafe in Manchester for £1,501.83 owed to two. Two things keep the proportions honest. The arrears periods on the list run from July 2012 to July 2025, so a business named on Thursday may have repaid years ago. And the spreadsheet carries no reason column, so nobody, including us, can say which of the causes below applies to the hospitality names.
The causes are in the bulletin, counted across all 658 employers, and they overlap, because some employers underpaid for more than one reason. 257 employers, 39%, made deductions from pay, or took payments from workers, that dragged pay below the minimum; the bulletin's examples include food and meals, uniform, "stock or till shortage", training costs, parking permits and "Worker purchase of clothes to meet dress code". 221 employers, 34%, failed to pay for working time; the examples are "additional work before and after a worker's shift", "rounding clock-in time", mandatory training, trial shifts and overtime. 108 fell into the bulletin's catch-all "Other" row; 104 failed to pay the uprated rate, a row the bulletin defines as covering both the 1 April increase and the failure to lift someone's pay when a birthday makes them eligible for a higher rate; 103 paid the apprentice rate to someone not entitled to it; 71 got the accommodation offset wrong; and a handful got worker status or work type wrong. The penalty mechanics are in the department's enforcement guidance rather than the release: up to 200% of the arrears, capped at £20,000 per worker, and halved if you fully comply with every term of the notice of underpayment within 14 days of it being served. HMRC can go back six years, and the bulletin reminds employers that minimum wage records must now be kept for six years. There is also a voluntary declaration route for an employer who checks and finds a problem before anyone else does.
What this means for you: On our count of the published list, 98 of the 148 named hospitality employers, two in three, underpaid ten workers or fewer, which is the size of notice a small independent generates, and the two commonest causes nationally are exactly the habits a five-to-fifteen-person cafe runs on informally. Friday's post on the gap between the hours you rota and the hours you pay told you to find out which way your clock-in rounding leans; this is the week to add which way is lawful. For hourly-paid staff the minimum wage is worked out across the pay reference period, the period you pay for, up to a month, as pay divided by the hours worked in it, so for anyone on £12.71 a minute worked and not paid takes them under it, and "rounding clock-in time" is on the government's list of causes by name, next to the ten minutes setting up before the door opens and the trial shift. On deductions, the staff meals post covered the tax position and told you to ring the meal through the till at £0.00 and value it at cost price; the minimum wage position is a separate test, and the distinction that decides it is deduction versus purchase. If you take £2 a shift out of the wages of someone on the minimum for lunch, or for the black trousers you asked them to wear, the government's guidance says the trousers deduction always reduces their minimum wage pay, and that a deduction for a meal you provide may do the same; either way, if it drops them under the rate you have underpaid. If the same worker buys the same lunch out of money you have already paid them, that payment does not reduce minimum wage pay, unless you required the purchase for the job and do not reimburse it, which is why the trousers behave differently from the sandwich. A deduction for the worker's own conduct where they are contractually liable, the guidance's example is a broken glass, sits outside the rule; but "stock or till shortage" is on the bulletin's own list of deductions that took pay under the minimum, so do not assume a shortage deduction is safe. Deductions of one kind or another put 257 employers on Thursday's list. The meal at zero is a perk; taking the cost out of the wage is a deduction. On rates, 104 employers missed an uprating and 103 misapplied the apprentice rate, and both are calendar problems: the school-age staff post has the 18th birthday moving someone from £8.00 to £10.85 overnight and the 21st to £12.71, and the apprenticeships guide is precise that the £8.00 apprentice rate applies only to apprentices under 19 or in their first year. Diary the birthdays, and diary the year-one anniversary. Our payroll post already lists minimum wage compliance as something to re-check at every rate change, whichever way you run the pay; if the check finds a rate you have to lift, the pay rise planner shows what it costs once employer NI and pension are on top. Keep the scale in view. The average hospitality arrears on Thursday's list was £55.66 a worker, and the median bill across the 115 food and drink businesses was under £1,500; the numbers do not look like anyone getting rich, and the list says nothing about intent either way. The penalty and the naming are the cost. The 50% reduction only runs from the day a notice of underpayment is served, so it is not a reason to wait for one; the reason to look first is the voluntary declaration route, which is open to an employer who finds the problem and repays it before HMRC does.
Read the Round 24 educational bulletin, with the causes table (DOCX) ->
Read the Round 24 naming spreadsheet (XLSX) ->
Read The Caterer on Five Guys and Whitbread ->
Check the minimum wage rules with Acas ->
The Order That Locks 1 October Was Signed on Tuesday - From Then On an Ex-Barista Has Six Months to Bring a Tribunal Claim, Not Three, and a Wages Claim in a Series Runs From the Last Deduction
On Tuesday 1 September Kate Dearden signed the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 5 and Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/954. Regulation 3 brings section 152 and Schedule 12 of the Act into force on 1 October 2026, and the explanatory note says what they do: they "extend time limits for instituting claims to employment tribunals from three to six months". Schedule 12 is almost entirely a list of places in existing law where "three" becomes "six": unfair dismissal, unauthorised deductions from wages, holiday pay under the Working Time Regulations, requests for information about tips, flexible working requests, detriment claims, written statements of terms, a worker's right to see their minimum wage records, agency worker claims, and discrimination claims under the Equality Act. Breach of contract claims move with them under a separate order, SI 2026/759, in England and Wales from the same date; the government's timeline, updated on 25 August, has Scotland following on 9 November. A companion instrument made in July, SI 2026/758, does the same to seven more sets of regulations, including the part-time workers, fixed-term employees and zero-hours exclusivity rules.
The useful part is the transitional table, because it says when the clock starts. Regulation 4 provides that the six-month limit does not apply where the "relevant date" falls before 1 October 2026, and the Schedule then defines the relevant date claim by claim. For unfair dismissal it is the effective date of termination, so a dismissal that takes effect on 30 September gets the old three months and one that takes effect on 1 October gets six. For a wages claim it is "the date of payment of the wages from which the deduction ... was made", and then the line that matters for a cafe: "Where the complaint relates to a series of deductions or payments, the last deduction or payment in the series." That restates the existing rule rather than inventing one, but it now sits in front of a six-month window, and it means a recurring habit is not a one-off three-month exposure. The clock runs from the last deduction in the series, so it resets every payday until the habit stops, though on an ordinary wages claim the arrears a tribunal can look at stop two years before the claim is filed.
Two things did not change on Tuesday, and since our Employment Rights Act explainer has already been corrected once on its way to accuracy, they are worth stating. The unfair dismissal change is section 25, a six-month qualifying period in place of two years and the removal of the cap on the compensatory award, and it is commenced for 1 January 2027 by an earlier order, not for day one and not for October. The 30 October duty to prevent harassment of your staff by customers rests on the government's published timeline; as of this weekend no commencement order for section 21 exists on legislation.gov.uk, so the date is a plan, not yet an instrument.
What this means for you: The explainer has carried the 1 October date for a fortnight, sourced to the government's timeline; what changed on Tuesday is that the date is fixed by an instrument rather than a plan, with a transitional table attached. The effect on a cafe is archival rather than legal. A fair dismissal is still fair and a correct payslip is still correct; what the order changes is how long the evidence has to exist after someone leaves, and the answer is twice as long. Your summer leavers are the live case. The seasonal contracts post explained that letting a fixed-term contract lapse is a dismissal in law, and that on three months' service the ordinary unfair dismissal risk is very low because of the qualifying period, while telling you to check the current position on Acas rather than assume it. Wages, holiday pay and discrimination claims have no qualifying period, and for wages the relevant date is the payment date, so a September leaver whose final pay lands in October gets six months on that payment, even though the dismissal itself, with a September effective date, keeps the old three. The folder for each leaver is short: the rota, the clock-in export, the holiday calculation, the final payslip and the P45, kept together and kept for the six years the minimum wage rules already demand. Friday's reconciliation of rota'd hours against paid hours is the document you would most want to be able to produce, because the series rule turns any rounding or break-deduction habit into a claim that runs from the last payday it touched, and the fix is the same one Thursday's naming list points at: stop the habit, and the series ends. If you run a tronc, the records the tipping guide says you must keep from 1 October answer a six-month window on a complaint that you had no written tips policy or did not produce the records a worker asked for; the bigger tips claim, that you did not deal with tips fairly, already carries twelve months and this order does not touch it. None of this needs a lawyer this week. It needs the leaver's folder to exist, and to still exist in April.
Read the commencement order on legislation.gov.uk ->
Read Schedule 12 of the Act, the claim-by-claim list ->
Read the breach of contract order for England and Wales ->
Read the government's Employment Rights Act timeline, updated 25 August ->
Only 19% of Small US Operators Are Trying AI With No Vendor Involved - 42% Get It Solely Through Their Tech Vendors, and the "Comfort With AI" Number Everyone Quoted Moved One Point in a Year
On 26 August Toast published its 2026 Voice of the Restaurant Industry survey. The methodology is on the page and it is better than most: a blind survey of 676 US restaurant decision-makers operating 16 or fewer locations, Toast and non-Toast customers, fielded from 3 to 20 April, respondents "not made aware that Toast was fielding the study", panel incentives paid, and a margin of error of plus or minus 4%. The numbers that travelled were the comfortable ones. 87% of operators say they are comfortable using AI; 85% expect to use more of it; 81% believe it will make them more efficient; 81% trust it with their business needs; 81% say AI tools offer great value for money. FastCasual's write-up, by its publisher Cherryh Cansler, headed that section "AI has moved from experiment to expectation". Toast's own bullets tell a flatter story: comfort is up one point on last year, the efficiency figure has not moved at all, and the report concedes that operators' "feelings toward AI are similar to our survey last year".
The number nobody put in a headline is the one about who is doing the choosing. Asked how they are experimenting with AI, 42% of operators said solely through their vendor partners; 25% said both through vendors and on their own; and 19% said on their own but not through vendors, a figure that is 16% among quick-service operators and 23% among full-service ones. 11% are considering it and 2% are not. The rest of the survey is worth having for the labour lines. Inflation is the top challenge, with 27% putting it in their top three difficulties, up seven points, and hiring second at 22%, up six. Asked what they would do if the cost of goods rises, 43% would raise menu prices, down five points; 39% would run leaner inventory, up twelve; and 33% would "start tracking the price of key ingredients", up four. 49% plan to increase staff this year, down from 60% last year, and 48% plan to keep headcount flat, up ten points. The labour responses, in Restaurant Dive's 4 September summary of the same study, are answers to what operators would do if labour challenges got worse: 51% would increase staff efficiency and speed of service, 49% would work on retention, 45% would optimise shift scheduling, and 35% would bring in technology to "reduce staff and guest touchpoints". The smaller of Toast's two size bands is the less worried: 12% of US restaurants under $1m in gross merchandise volume said they were concerned about current market conditions, against 26% of those above it. One caveat the report discloses but never flags: fieldwork closed on 20 April and it was published on 26 August, four months later. And Toast describes itself in its own boilerplate as integrating "software, agentic AI, payments, financial technology solutions and hardware", so a survey finding that small operators are comfortable with AI is commercially convenient, which the blind design and the inclusion of non-Toast customers partly answer and do not entirely.
What this means for you: In July this column wrote that every AI story it had run all year had the same shape, a hospitality software company bolting a model onto its product and selling you the feature, and then reported OpenAI breaking the pattern by selling to owners direct. Toast has now put a number on the pattern: for two in five small operators the vendor is the only route to AI they have used, and only one in five is experimenting with no vendor in the mix at all, though a further quarter do both. Read that as a description of next year. The AI you will actually be using in twelve months is mostly a by-product of procurement decisions you have already made, about your till, your rota app and your accounting software, and it will arrive as a feature in a release note, not as a choice. That moves the questions that matter off the AI product page and into the contract. What can be switched on to your account without your consent, and can it be priced? What happens to your sales and staff data when the vendor's model reads it? Can you export a clean CSV and walk? Our EPOS comparison ended on the same test, that a free plan with clean exports and a proper costing tool beats a £150-a-month till with locked-down reporting, and Thursday's audit of the contracts that renew themselves is where the notice dates live. The modular software post is the counterweight to a vendor choosing your roadmap for you. Then apply the test our AI guide set in April to whatever does arrive, which is whether it saves time or money this month; the 60% of UK small businesses who said in August that AI had made minimal difference so far are what happens when the feature ships without the test. And notice which lines in Toast's cost-response list grew: not price rises, which fell five points, but leaner inventory, up twelve, and "start tracking the price of key ingredients", up four, the two least glamorous answers in the survey. If you want a version of vendor-independent AI that runs on data you already hold, the free Square category analyser takes two of your own category sales exports and shows where the mix moved between them, with nobody's roadmap attached. The usual caveats travel with the whole story: it is US data, "small" there means up to 16 sites, and nobody surveyed a two-till cafe in Witney.
Read FastCasual's five takeaways ->
Read Restaurant Dive on the retention findings ->
The "New" £10m Hospitality Grant Scheme Is January's Pub Fund Reworked - £3m Is Ring-Fenced for a Pub Non-Profit, No Grant Size Is Published, and the Guidance Sits Behind a Login
On Wednesday 2 September the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade announced that "Village pubs, family-run restaurants, and neighbourhood cafés received a boost today as a new £10 million three-year Hospitality Grant Scheme has launched for applications." The money "will be invested into projects that help get new hospitality ventures off the ground, bring vacant premises back into use, or support training programmes that help people develop the skills, confidence and work ethic to open doors to future careers." The bullets at the top say "Over £3 million" is earmarked for Pub is The Hub, a non-profit that helps pubs in rural and deprived areas add village stores, community cafes and play areas; the body text says £3m. The scheme builds on a pilot that the release says helped deliver "over 70 rural pub projects, two hospitality training facilities in UK prisons, and an innovation hub". Kate Dearden: "This funding will back local businesses to grow, boost opportunities for people across the UK and support growth in every part of the country." Pub is The Hub's chief executive John Longden, in the sentence worth underlining: "The scheme will also encourage the leveraging of other match private and public funding to support these small businesses." And in the notes to editors: "Guidance is available now, with applications being received from the end of September: see here". The "see here" goes to the department's grants portal and, as of Sunday 6 September, redirects to a login page. A search for "hospitality" on the government's own Find a Grant service returned zero grants the same day. No grant size, no eligibility criteria and no closing date are published anywhere we could find.
The document behind this one is dated 27 January 2026. That Treasury release, under the then Chancellor Rachel Reeves, announced "£10 million of funding for the Hospitality Support Fund over three years - upped from £1.5 million for one year announced last April - to support pubs across the UK", with the aim of helping "over 1,000 pubs provide extra services for local communities, including creating community cafes, village stores and play areas". Same £10m, same three years, pubs only. The Caterer was the only outlet we found that put the two side by side, reporting that the government had reworked the scheme to add restaurants and cafes to the recipients, and that the January ambition of a thousand pubs "now appears to have been condensed into the £3m specifically earmarked to support Pub is the Hub". UKHospitality's chief executive Allen Simpson told the same paper: "While any level of grant funding is undoubtedly positive, we do need to see significant action at the Budget to reduce the tax burden for the entire hospitality sector." On our arithmetic, which no release publishes, £10m over three years is about £3.3m a year across all UK hospitality, and once the pub non-profit's £3m is set aside there is under £7m over three years for everyone else. The release also restates the 20% business rates cut for "pubs, clubs and live music venues", at "an estimated £1,000 next year" for the typical pub, "from April" with no year given; the July announcement it refers to said £1,100, in England, from April 2027, and we ran that one on 27 July.
What this means for you: Read it as a lesson in reading a grant announcement rather than as news of money, because the three questions any operator asks first are the three the release does not answer: what could I get, am I eligible, and when does it close. Compare the apprenticeship hiring payment we covered on 17 August, which came with published amounts, published dates and published conditions; this comes with a login page. It is also the third time this year that a hospitality support announcement has started at the bar. Our business rates guide has a section headed "Pubs get help. Cafés and restaurants don't.", the July rates cut was pubs, clubs and music venues, and this time cafes are in the headline because the government reworked a pub fund rather than found new money. The usable action is small. If you have a training programme you already run, a vacant unit next door you have looked at, or a second site in your head, register on the grants portal now so that you can actually read the guidance when the application window opens, and take the match-funding line at face value: schemes that talk about leverage usually expect you to bring money. The opening-cost post is what a "new hospitality venture" costs before any grant, and it is the number to hold the eventual award against. And keep it out of the forecast. The 13-week cash flow post is built on money that has a date, and a grant with no size, no criteria and no closing date has none of those.
Read the 2 September release on GOV.UK ->
Read the 27 January Treasury release it grew out of ->
Read The Caterer's comparison of the two ->
Read the Morning Advertiser's report ->
The Met Office Has Put a Number on How Often to Expect a Summer Like That One - a Provisional 16.5C, Around 130 Times More Likely Because of Climate Change, and Now "Roughly a 1 in 9 Year Event"
On Tuesday 1 September the Met Office published its provisional statistics for summer 2026, and the headline is the one you expected: a UK mean temperature of 16.5C, the warmest summer in a series that goes back to 1884, ahead of last year's 16.1C, with 2018, 2006 and 2003 tied on 15.7C behind them. The margin over 2025 is 0.40C, which Dr Mark McCarthy, the Met Office's head of climate attribution, calls "a significant margin for a seasonal temperature". Measured by average daytime maximum rather than by mean, 2026 is also the warmest on record, ahead of 1976, which now sits seventh on the mean-temperature list. England, Wales and Northern Ireland each broke their summer records; Scotland had its joint-sixth warmest. The season peaked at 38.1C at Kew Gardens on 13 August, and 54 stations broke their all-time daily maximum records. Month by month: the UK's second warmest June, even though England's was its warmest, as we reported in July; the second warmest July; and an August at 16.5C, 1.4C above average, in which seven southern English counties, Oxfordshire among them, broke their August records. Late-August unsettled weather eased the month's temperature figures. It did not make August a cool month. Every figure is provisional.
The new part is the attribution. The Met Office ran a rapid climate attribution study alongside the statistics and reports that the summer "was made around 130 times more likely because of human-induced climate change". McCarthy on the return period: "Our analysis shows a summer like the one we've just experienced is now around 130 times more likely because of climate change. In a climate unaffected by human emissions of greenhouse gases, a summer like this would be exceptionally unlikely, i.e. 1 in over 1,000 years. In our current climate, which is changing because of the effect of burning of fossil fuels, we should now expect this to be roughly a 1 in 9 year event." The release gives the natural-climate return period as 1,148 years and adds, in its own words: "Note that for an event that extreme the return period estimates carry large uncertainty." These are estimated return periods from a rapid study built on two large sets of computer simulations, one with human influence removed, not observed frequencies. Dr James Pope, a Met Office climate scientist, adds the planning line: summer 2026 would be around average for a UK summer in a world 2.5 to 3C warmer than the pre-industrial period, and in a world 4C warmer "would be considered cool or below average". Dr Amy Doherty, who leads the National Climate Information Centre: "These records are now breaking with increasing frequency, reflecting the influence of human-induced climate change on the temperatures we're experiencing in the UK."
What this means for you: In July the story was that heat moves trade rather than killing it, and it ended with the line that a rota and menu that move as fast as your customers do are "a muscle worth building now, not next June". The Met Office has now said how often you should expect to use it: on its own modelled estimate, with wide error bars it prints itself, about one summer in nine. That is not a freak you improvise around. It is a frequency you write into a budget, and the release contains no trade, footfall or energy data at all, so everything from here is our read rather than the Met Office's. This is not about the menu this month. The autumn switch post is right that the first cool Tuesday kills the iced line overnight, and its rule stands: switch on the till data, and hold the iced range if iced drinks are still above 25 percent of drinks sold in mid-September. It is about next summer, decided this autumn, which is when the capacity questions get answered anyway. Chiller and display capacity, ice-making capacity and air handling are capital lines, and the lease-or-buy post is where the structure of paying for them gets decided; their running cost is an energy line, October is a big renewal window, and the free assessment our energy guide recommends is the first call, with the quotes read eight to twelve weeks before the contract ends rather than in the renewal month. The cold chain is a habits question that the heatwave post already answered, starting with running the fridges at 5C so that a 30C afternoon has somewhere to drift to. And the mix shift only helps if what it shifts into is costed: the frappe breakdown and the cold brew yield maths are the two summer lines our own posts say get built from memory rather than costed, and the free recipe costing tool is where you find out whether the drinks the heat sent customers towards actually earned. The summer trading playbook argued for planning the summer in May. After two record summers in a row, the plan can start in October, on two years of your own till data, and the kit list can go in the budget next to the rates bill.
Read the Met Office release, with the provisional statistics and the attribution study ->
The Brikly Take
Five stories, and in every one the press release was true and the document underneath it was the useful part: the spreadsheet behind "nearly 660", the transitional table behind "three to six months", the 19% behind the 87%, the January release behind the September one, the return period behind the record. What each leaves an independent is a small job with a date on it. Check the payroll for deductions and unpaid minutes before anyone else does. Put the summer leavers' folders together and keep them six years. Read the contract, not the AI page, because that is where next year's features are being decided. Register for the grant guidance, and keep the grant out of the forecast. Cost the iced line before you buy the second chiller.
Three of this week's five stories are the government publishing its own working. The working is where the story was. Read the working.
The Weekly Grind is published every Monday by Brikly - modular intelligence tools for independent cafe and coffee shop owners. Got a story we should cover? Get in touch ->
Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafes in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent cafe owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.