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The specialty coffee industry faces several structural challenges when it comes to commercial espresso service. One of the most significant is the growing number of manufacturers seeking access to the U.S. market without committing to the long-term service infrastructure that specialty coffee equipment ownership requires.

Rather than establishing a dedicated U.S. distribution center with complete parts inventory and technical support, some manufacturers rely on multiple independent retailers to import and resell their equipment. While this approach increases market exposure, it thins distribution to the point that no single distributor is truly accountable to the brand. The result is familiar to many in specialty coffee: inconsistent parts availability, limited technical assistance, and uneven service outcomes from market to market.

In an industry built on precision, reliability, and customer experience, this lack of service accountability directly undermines café operations, brand trust and the commercial espresso service infrastructure.

When No Distributor Owns the Brand

This fragmented distribution model reinforces a mindset often heard from specialty coffee service companies: “I only service what I sell.” Distributors, like technicians, are financially incentivized to support only the equipment tied to their own sales. 

In theory, distributors stock the parts people will buy. In practice, intense distributor competition undermines that logic. When multiple distributors sell the same espresso machine brand, no single distributor can reliably capture downstream parts sales. The return on investing in comprehensive parts inventory becomes uncertain, while the cost is immediate and significant.

Faced with this reality, many distributors make a rational business decision: instead of tying up capital in parts, they invest in marketing, pricing incentives, and equipment sales growth—areas where the payoff is direct and defensible. The result is a system where selling equipment is rewarded, but long-term service support—the foundation of café uptime—is fragmented and underfunded.

This is not a failure of individual distributors; it is a structural outcome of a model where no one truly owns the brand. Specialty coffee service companies are left bridging the gap—expected to support equipment without consistent access to parts or distributor-backed resources.

When Goodwill Becomes an Operating Expense

The burden created by this model ultimately falls on specialty coffee service technicians. Retailers sell the equipment, it enters cafés and roasteries, and technicians—often motivated by a genuine commitment to supporting the specialty coffee community—are left to manage the consequences.

Supporting these brands forces service companies to spend time sourcing parts from multiple distributors, navigating inconsistent or unavailable technical support, and working from incomplete documentation. As a result, technicians often delay initial service visits—not because of lack of skill or willingness. While some of this effort may be charged to the equipment owner, much of the cost is absorbed by the service company in the form of lost time, reduced profitability, and strained capacity. Time spent chasing parts is time not spent repairing or maintaining equipment. 

What is often overlooked by industry professionals is how this affects technician workload and what it means to be “full-time” in the field. Service technicians must support multiple customers per day to remain viable. Once you account for stocking a service vehicle, travel time, and phone-based troubleshooting, a technician who is thorough is already limited in the customers they can support per day. When one unsupported machine consumes more hours—tracking down documentation, confirming parts availability, or compensating for poor manufacturer support—it effectively turns a full-time technician into part-time and a less profitable one. The work still happens, but it either forces overtime to meet demand or reduces the total number of customers that can be served that day. Telling service companies to “just bill for it” ignores this reality and shifts the cost unfairly to café owners, who were never told that buying a specific espresso machine would mean paying for inefficiency rather than service.

This hidden labor does not create more technical jobs. It consumes the limited bandwidth of existing technicians without compensation, resulting in increased burnout and declining service quality—not only for unsupported brands, but for all specialty coffee businesses relying on the same finite pool of trained technicians. As response times stretch from hours into days or weeks, these delays are now gradually becoming normalized for the commercial espresso service industry.

As unsupported equipment continues to enter the U.S. specialty coffee market, the strain compounds. Without collective action, the outcome is predictable: slower response times, increased café downtime, frustrated baristas, and an ecosystem stretched beyond its limits.

What Real U.S. Market Commitment Looks Like

Specialty coffee technicians deserve a single, reliable point of contact for any equipment operating in the United States. For this reason, sustainable service companies should prioritize brands that invest in the long-term health of the specialty coffee service ecosystem: manufacturers that maintain a complete domestic parts inventory, and provide accessible and knowledgeable technical support.

A More Sustainable Path Forward

The mission of the Espresso Service Network is to build a stronger, more strategic commercial espresso service infrastructure. Our goal is to improve outcomes for manufacturers, service providers, and equipment owners across the full lifecycle of equipment ownership.

That future depends on service companies uniting around shared standards—vetting manufacturers, prioritizing long-term support over short-term sales, and refusing to subsidize incomplete market commitments with unpaid labor.