DUNTON, UK - Five years ago, Amy McMillan founded the Coffee Can Company with one simple aim: to bring simply great coffee to her community.
She’d managed a local coffee shop and had originally planned to open her own coffee shop, but then the pandemic hit. Going mobile meant a smaller outlay and less risk, so needed was a van. Taking her mum’s wise words — “Well, it has to be a Ford, they won’t let you down” — Amy went out and bought her first Ford Transit Connect to convert into a mobile coffee van. That’s when she ran into what would become her biggest hurdle for the next five years: power.
“I hadn’t really thought about how we’d efficiently power our coffee equipment,” she explains. “One of our setups draws almost 6kW of electricity — more than the boiler in your house. Sure, we could have gone with a gas coffee machine, but they’re less reliable. A generator? Too big, noisy, and smelly (and a nightmare to drag to events). That left plugging into mains power… and for the past five years, that’s exactly what we’ve done.
