Sauce pump

Delivers a repeatable volume of a thick product on each full stroke, which is what turns a chocolate or caramel line from a habit into a costed, repeatable recipe.

• Measure your own pumps before you cost anything with them, and measure them the way the figures below were produced: prime the pump, deliver ten full strokes into a graduated cylinder, and divide the total by ten. Ten strokes rather than one is the entire method — a single stroke's error is the whole reading, and across ten it is a tenth of it, which is what makes the number survive a pump being replaced with a different one.
• Buy one pump per open bottle and leave it there for the life of the bottle. This is an allergen control before it is a flavour one: a pump moved from a nut-bearing sauce to another product carries residue on the outside of the dip tube into the next bottle, and no cleaning routine that happens at close will help a drink served at eleven in the morning.
• Write recipes in strokes, never in squeezes, drizzles or spoons. A stroke is a unit the costing engine can hold, a trainee can be given on their first shift and a manager can audit from across the bar. Everything else is a description of an intention.
• Re-measure after a pump is replaced, and treat a replacement as a new measurement rather than a like-for-like swap. Displacement varies between manufacturers and between production runs, and a bar that quietly fits a different pump to the same bottle has changed a recipe without changing the recipe.
• Plan for the cold. A thick sauce in a cold room or on a cold morning draws slowly, and the stroke that the barista does not wait out is the stroke that under-delivers. If sauces are stored cold, the recipe needs either a temper step or an acceptance that the first drinks of the day are lighter than the rest.
• Inspect for wear rather than waiting for failure. A pump whose seals have hardened delivers less on the same stroke, and the drink gets weaker over months with nobody able to name the day it changed — so a pump is a consumable, and re-measuring one that has been in service is how you find out it is finished.
• Keep the pump with its bottle at close, and never in a communal sanitiser bucket where it will be picked up and fitted to whatever is nearest tomorrow. The discipline that makes the measurement worth having is the same discipline that keeps the allergen path closed.