Franke’s New A Line machine enables cafés to create efficiencies and protect margins without compromising the high standard of coffee customers now expect.
As the coffee industry grapples with staffing pressures and rising operational costs, Australian and New Zealand café owners have become acutely aware of how improved workflow can translate into business success.
It’s a reality they’re living every day, and they’re the type of challenges Swiss fully automatic coffee machine manufacturer Franke hopes to resolve as it rolls out the New A Line machine to the Australasian market.
David Downing, Franke’s Business Development Director Oceania, says the New A Line – first unveiled at Host Milano in 2025 – is designed to help streamline and relieve these challenges through automation.
The manufacturer’s goal is to meet the needs of a broad spectrum of businesses, from independent cafés to multinational operators, without compromising on performance or reliability.
“Right now, there is a lot of pressure on café owners, as well as roasters, who operate outside cafés – and they’re significant,” says David.
“With Franke’s New A Line system now being rolled out across the region, it gives them the ability to produce a product that’s similar or identical to what you’ll get in a café through a traditional machine – all at the touch of a button with automatic technology.”
Over the past decade, Franke’s Classic A Line has become a familiar presence in cafés, hotels, and convenience stores worldwide.
The New A Line builds on those foundations, while introducing a suite of technological advancements designed to raise expectations of what fully automatic machines can deliver, including: iQFlow, New FoamMaster, and IndividualMilk technologies, configuration capabilities, high temperatures, and access to the FrankeOS cloud system.
David is confident excitement behind the New A Line since its global launch will translate into the Australian and New Zealand context. With both nations renowned for their high-quality speciality coffee culture, he hopes the New A Line will complement, rather than replace.
“We launched the New A Line across Oceania in February and the feedback from everyone – roasters, distributors, dealers, and customers – was very positive, because we were able to demonstrate the quality of the extraction espresso first and foremost, and its ability to blend coffees,” he says.
David says that although it is a challenge to break into the Australasian café market – with automation more prolific in Europe – Franke feels the New A Line system “offers something unique” that will prompt the local industry take notice.
“We know a lot of cafés are already incorporating automation, whether it be the traditional press or the grinders – the New A Line is an extension of that,” he says.
“It’s a coffee system that allows cafés to do what they’re already doing. Certainly, from a footprint perspective, it is smaller than a machine they might currently have in a café – plus it will handle high traffic.”
David says the New A Line can blend coffees to create a unique flavour, with its foam capabilities notable – the New FoamMaster technology can produce foam at high temperature (72 degrees Celsius) without steam.
“Roasters, particularly, could see the quality of the beverage that we produced, and the quality of that texturing,” he says.
“What they could do with texturing was quite significant, and certainly on par with what you could achieve with a traditional machine.”
And in an era where demand for cold beverages and alternative coffee options is ever-growing, the New A Line meets this challenge too.
“Operators can create thick, cold foam. The machine can also deliver iced beverages as well, and that could include powdered products like matcha, or hot chocolate,” says David.
“It allows [cafés] to expand and give the customer what they want in the flavourings at the touch of a button.”
In addition to high-quality foam, the New A Line features technology that separates dairy and alternative milk via Franke’s IndividualMilk technology.
“The machine is able to incorporate dairy products, but it can also dispense alternative milks too, with complete separation – so you still get that foaming quality at extraction,” says David.
“The technology within the system still gives you the quality of product, whether it’s dairy or, for example, soy milk. We’ve designed a fridge-style system that has three litres of capacity, and that capacity is significant enough for those who want an alternative beverage – the quality we get out of it is exceptional.”
Here to help
The New A Line also includes the FrankeOS – the manufacturer’s digital interface. This is considered the brand’s new digital backbone, with the platform enabling recipe management, remote updates, and performance insights, bringing software, connectivity, and user experience into a single, intuitive system. By simplifying navigation and daily routines, FrankeOS also aims to reduce training time while giving operators clearer visibility over machine performance.
In short, David says it enables scalable control across multiple locations. “If you had a café chain, all the systems can be connected, with access to all the data within the system.”
That data from FrankeOS can also provide key information on how beverages are selling, especially during peak periods, extraction data and times, temperatures, and grammage available in graphs and data.
While automation comes with clear operational benefits, David notes customers also want reliability, consistency, and quality.
“Distinctly, success in [Australia and New Zealand] would be that we change the perception in the market of automatics – not just around hot beverages, but also cold beverage offerings, and what you can achieve through an automatic system,” he says.
With its advanced technology, David says the system produces exceptional products – both hot and cold – with target markets including national and regional chains, the hotel segment, convenience markets, and the corporate sector.
“The New A Line gives a lot of options, rather than a staff member being pressured to produce consistent quality, time and time again. It is here to help, and it’s a major point of difference that we’re really going to market with this year,” he says.
“As we always say: you need to come and test it, you need to come play with it, you need to come and see what it can do.”
For more information, visit aline.franke.coffee
This article appears in the April 2026 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
