Old Spike Expands London Presence With Seventh Café and Launches Live Impact Dashboard
Old Spike, a London-based specialty coffee roaster and social enterprise, has opened its seventh café in Southwark, introducing a new way for customers to see how their coffee purchases contribute to social change. The new café on Great Suffolk Street features what the company believes is the UK hospitality industry’s first live impact dashboard powered by Square, the global payments platform.
The initiative highlights Old Spike’s commitment to creating meaningful employment opportunities for people experiencing homelessness. By combining transaction data with real-time visual storytelling, the company aims to demonstrate how everyday purchases can support practical training, paid work placements and pathways into long-term employment.
The launch marks another milestone for Old Spike, which has operated with a dual purpose since its establishment: roasting high-quality specialty coffee while helping people overcome barriers to employment. The company plans to introduce the dashboard across all seven of its London cafés, allowing more customers to understand the social impact of their spending.
Using Coffee Purchases to Support Employment Opportunities
At the heart of Old Spike’s operations is its Barista Training and Employment Programme, which provides practical skills development, paid work placements and support for people seeking sustainable employment after experiencing homelessness.
Since opening in 2015, more than 350 people have completed the company’s training course. The programme is designed to help participants build confidence, develop workplace skills and access employment opportunities that might otherwise be difficult to secure.
For individuals facing homelessness, finding stable work can involve significant challenges, including navigating recruitment procedures, demonstrating previous experience and overcoming gaps in employment history. Old Spike’s approach seeks to address these barriers by providing structured training and opportunities to gain practical experience in a supportive environment.
The organisation combines its social mission with a commercial coffee business, creating a model in which the growth of its operations can help expand its employment programme. Its cafés, roasting activities and wholesale partnerships provide opportunities to connect specialty coffee with social impact.
The new dashboard makes this relationship more visible to customers. Rather than communicating its mission solely through written materials or promotional messaging, Old Spike can now display information showing how customer transactions contribute to the outcomes it seeks to achieve.
By bringing these figures into the café environment, the company hopes to strengthen the connection between purchasing coffee and supporting people as they work towards greater financial stability and independence.
How the Live Impact Dashboard Works
The Southwark café is the first Old Spike location to feature the new live impact dashboard. The system uses Square transaction data to record purchases and connect them with relevant measures associated with the company’s training and employment programme.
When a customer completes a purchase, Square automatically sends the transaction information to the Impact Dashboard system. The system records the transaction and calculates the relevant impact measures and key performance indicators (KPIs).
The resulting information is then transformed into visual content through an animation application. These graphics are displayed on public-facing screens inside the café, enabling customers to see the social outcomes associated with Old Spike’s activities.
The dashboard highlights several important indicators, including the number of trainees who complete the programme, the number of graduates who secure lasting employment and the amount paid to participants during their work placements.
These measures help illustrate the different stages of the employment journey, from developing practical skills to gaining experience in a workplace and progressing towards sustained employment.
By presenting the information through clear visualisations, Old Spike aims to make its impact easier to understand. Customers can see how the company’s commercial activity supports its broader mission, creating a more direct link between individual transactions and the social enterprise’s work.
The dashboard also demonstrates how businesses can use existing payment technology to communicate information about their social objectives. Rather than relying exclusively on periodic impact reports, the system offers an ongoing, in-store view of selected performance indicators.
Old Spike intends to expand the dashboard to its remaining cafés, extending the initiative to more locations and giving customers across its London network an opportunity to engage with the company’s mission.
Algo Develops Visual Experience to Communicate Social Impact
The dashboard’s visual presentation was created by Algo, a motion design and data-visualisation studio that contributed its work on a pro bono basis to support efforts to address homelessness.
Algo developed a modular animation system powered by Rive, a technology used to create interactive and animated digital experiences. Rive is also associated with the technology behind Spotify’s widely recognised Wrapped campaign.
The system transforms the dashboard’s data into engaging animations suitable for public-facing screens. Its modular design allows information to be communicated through a visual format intended to make performance indicators accessible to customers in a busy hospitality environment.
Presenting impact data in this way can help organisations make complex information more approachable. Instead of asking customers to interpret detailed reports or numerical tables, the animations provide a straightforward way to understand selected outcomes.
Algo’s contribution also reflects the collaborative nature of the project. Old Spike brings the social mission and operational data, Square provides the transaction infrastructure, and Algo contributes the creative expertise needed to communicate the results effectively.
By providing its services without charge, Algo has helped Old Spike introduce the dashboard while supporting the wider effort to create employment opportunities for people experiencing homelessness.
The collaboration demonstrates how technology and creative services can be combined to help social enterprises communicate their purpose and engage customers in their work.
Programme Graduates Highlight the Value of Practical Training
The impact of Old Spike’s employment programme is reflected in the experiences of people who have participated in its training and progressed into work.
Hadi, who completed training through Old Spike and now works at The Breakfast Club, one of the organisation’s employment partners, said the programme helped him develop both practical skills and confidence.
According to Hadi, the training provided skills that he uses in his daily work. He also explained that the opportunity helped him move into employment without having to navigate what he described as a daunting screening process, allowing him to demonstrate the abilities developed through the initial programme.
His experience illustrates the importance of practical preparation and supportive employment pathways for people who may encounter additional obstacles when seeking work.
For Old Spike, the programme is intended to do more than provide short-term training. Its focus on paid work placements and lasting employment aims to help participants build experience and move towards greater stability.
Partnerships with employers such as The Breakfast Club are an important part of this approach, connecting training with opportunities in the wider hospitality sector.
By supporting participants as they develop workplace skills and transition into jobs, Old Spike seeks to create a model in which commercial hospitality operations can contribute to longer-term social outcomes.
Leadership Emphasises the Connection Between Business and Social Impact
Richard Robinson, CEO of Old Spike, said the organisation was established with two central objectives: producing exceptional roasted coffee and creating genuine routes into employment for people experiencing homelessness.
Robinson explained that the live dashboard allows customers to see how their purchases contribute to training, paid work placements and opportunities for lasting employment.
He also highlighted the relationship between business performance and the organisation’s social mission, noting that stronger coffee operations can help create more employment opportunities.
The dashboard is intended to make this relationship visible at the point of purchase, reinforcing the idea that customers can support the company’s work through their everyday spending.
John O’Beirne, CEO of Square International, also praised Old Spike’s approach to helping people experiencing homelessness move into stable, long-term employment.
O’Beirne said Square was proud to help the social enterprise use transaction data to communicate its story and demonstrate how individual purchases contribute to efforts to improve people’s lives.
His comments underline the role payment technology can play beyond processing transactions. When used alongside relevant data systems, payment information can help businesses explain their operations, measure selected outcomes and communicate their wider purpose to customers.
For Old Spike, the partnership provides a practical way to connect its commercial activity with its employment programme in a visible and accessible format.
Expanding a Social Enterprise Across London’s Coffee Market
Alongside its seven London cafés, Old Spike operates a specialty coffee roasting facility in Brixton. The company also supplies wholesale partners throughout the UK and serves customers through an online coffee subscription service.
These activities form part of its broader business model, combining coffee production, retail, wholesale distribution and direct-to-consumer sales with a commitment to supporting people experiencing homelessness.
The opening of the Southwark café expands the company’s physical presence while introducing a new method of communicating its social impact. The planned rollout of the dashboard across its other cafés could help make the initiative a more consistent part of the customer experience.
The project also highlights an approach that other hospitality businesses may consider when looking for ways to communicate their social and community commitments. By linking transaction information with selected impact indicators, businesses can give customers a clearer understanding of how their spending relates to broader objectives.
For Old Spike, however, the dashboard is closely tied to its founding mission: using a specialty coffee business to create practical employment opportunities and help people move towards greater independence.
With the opening of its seventh London café, the company is combining retail expansion with technology designed to make its social contribution more transparent. The live dashboard brings that mission into the café itself, showing customers how Old Spike seeks to connect the success of its coffee business with meaningful employment outcomes.
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