Maui Wowi had a big first – providing our mobile smoothie bar to The Julliard School for their Stress Less Week before final exams. We have been providing smoothie bars for campus events since 2002, but somehow we never had been to this great institution. It was a great day and the student musicians, singers and dancers were definitely less stressed after a fun smoothie event in New York.

About Us

Maui Wowi Coffee & Smoothie Catering has been serving the corporate event market on Long Island and NYC for more than 17 years.  We provide mobile espresso and coffee bars featuring our own custom coffees available exclusively through our catering service.

 Event Types

We work with human resource managers for event types including corporate meetings,  promotional events,  and client and employee appreciation events.

Our Menus

• Our Espresso and Coffee Bar service includes favorites like Cappuccino, Latte, Macchiato, and Americano (regular and decaf). We also offer Ghirardelli hot cocoa with a variety of toppings.
• We offer both hot and iced coffee/espresso/latte choices, cold-brew,  as well as frozen blended Cappuccino.
• We offer a choice of syrups (such as Caramel, Hazelnut, Vanilla, Peppermint, Pumpkin Spice and many others) and Ghirardelli chocolate and caramel sauces.
• Milk choices include regular, non-fat, almond and soy. We provide a choice of sugar and non-sugar sweeteners.
• We also offer fruit smoothies in a variety of flavors like Strawberry Banana, Pina Colada, Mango Orange, Black Raspberry, Kiwi Lemon Lime, Peach and frozen Lemonade.

 
Our Equipment, Servers and Other Details

• We use professional espresso machines and bean grinders to assure freshness and an ideal coffee extraction for our espresso drinks. Our servers are highly experienced and professional.
• Our attire is typically black shirts and pants, but we can dress in whatever way is appropriate for your event.
• We provide hot cups and other disposables for our beverages, however, we can use any china or glassware that you provide.
• We typically set up our service on folding tables with a linen cloth.
• We can accommodate any type of setup you require. We need a standard 110v/23 amp electrical service.
• We can provide a Certificate of Insurance with 48 hours notice.

 
Our Coffee
We use espresso beans from Kona, Hawaii for our espresso beverages. Why Hawaiian? Because we’ve tried espresso beans from all over the world and we find Kona beans offer the best balance and flavor. For our brewed coffees, we use beans from Maui, Molokai and Kona—each offering different flavor profiles.        
 
Our Clients
We have catered our espresso and coffee beverages from some of the leading companies and celebrities in metro New York. (We even catered an espresso bar for Billy Joel’s 4^th of July party.)
 
Our Service Area
We provide our mobile espresso and coffee catering service in the five boroughs of New York City, as well as Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, greater Philadelphia and southern New England.
 
Pricing and Contact Information
Our pricing is based on the number of guests and the hours of service you need.  Please call us at 866-448-7792 or complete the form for a quote. You can also email us at 

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Everyone loves our fresh-blended smoothies this time of year. We’re breaking out our special edition “tiki cups” – which are FOUR TIMES larger than our regular serving size for corporate and social events. Twenty-eight ounces of pina colada, strawberry banana, mango orange, frozen cappuccino, peach, black raspberry, or frozen lemonade. Mix and match flavors to create unique combinations. And your guests get to keep the cool souvenir cups.

This is a limited time availability, so do something BIG and BOLD for your people — whether an employee appreciation day, health and wellness fair, Nurse Appreciation Week (yes, it’s coming in May), grad party, or any other special event you’re planning.

Get in touch by email or call us at 866-448-7792. 

The week of May 6-12 is national Nurse Appreciation Week and it’s one of the busiest weeks of the year for our mobile smoothie catering business at Maui Wowi. We have been serving hospitals for over a decade that recognize the contribution of their nurses and medical support staff.

Here’s an idea: have a smoothie bar for your nursing staff (we can serve many hundreds an hour) and incorporate some fun promotional product gifts as well. A great company to contact is Positive Promotions. They’ve come up with a number of ideas to accompany a refreshing Maui Wowi smoothie at your event. We love the themes they’ve developed, like Living the Scrub Life. A great logo and positive message on a pair of cushioned ankle socks, a tote bag, a lunch cooler bag, a coffee-to-go mug set (and no reason we can’t pour a smoothie into those cups!) and many other employee appreciation and recognition ideas can be found on their website.

Maui Wowi can provide our mobile smoothie catering service for any size group. One of the larger groups we work with is Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. The last annual employee appreciation event we catered for them with our smoothie bar involved 2000+ attendees over three shifts from 11am to 1am. (That’s AM with an A.) The hospital’s HR team came up with a great theme – Superheros, to make the staff feel like the superheroes they truly are. The leadership provided novelties, signage and apparel to support the theme. The Maui Wowi staff even wore Superman t-shirts (although we told people the “S” stood for “Smoothie-Man)!

And for all of you trivia and crossword fans out there who may be wondering about the timing of national nurses week, which ends on May 12, there is something special about that date. It’s the birthday of Florence Nightingale. As anyone in the medical profession knows, Florence was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organized care for wounded soldiers. (OK, so you didn’t know that, but now you do and you can impress your friends over a Maui Wowi smoothie at your next employee appreciation event.)

Why would any corporate HR manager or event planner hire a catering company to cater an espresso bar for an event when they already have coffee in their break room or they can get a Joe to Go in a gallon jug from lots of places?

Great question. Here’s the answer.

A catered espresso bar (like what you can order from us here at Maui Wowi) means your staff will spend some actual time together at our bar. One day we should video the interactions of people who work for the same company when they get their lattes from us. Do they make a bee line right back to their desks? They do not. They socialize. We’ve seen some laugh, smile, joke, engage, collaborate—really! And we’ve never seen them argue, fight, be sarcastic or rude while sipping a cappuccino. It just doesn’t happen.

A catered espresso bar for your event—whether a corporate meeting, employee appreciation event, trade show promotion, client appreciation event or other reason — results in more human behavior. It’s amazing how much more people like each other they stop with the damn email, texting (often from distances of less than three feet) and….just…slow….down. You don’t chug an espresso or latte. You take your time and that gives you time to relate to another human being. (Don’t be frightened. Yes, your co-workers are human but they rarely bite.)

We get that catered espresso bar engagement going a bit more by personalizing choices. You want a mocha latte, she’s having a caramel macchiato, and those two are having Americanos. Someone else has a cold brew coffee and another person a steamed almond milk with hazelnut syrup. We don’t judge! It’s all about individuality. We can commune and combine while we maintain our individuality.

So yes, you could have that lukewarm coffee container you lugged from Dunkin’. You could even have one of those soulless automaton espresso robot vending machines installed in your office. Or God forbid a K-cup machine to further clog the landfill with those horrid unrecyclable plastic pods. Wow, I can barely stand the excitement of your so-called “employee benefit!”

Skip all that frou-frou. For your everyday coffee, go simple with the good old-fashioned drip brewer. When you want something special, call Maui Wowi for our mobile espresso and coffee service, as well as our all-natural fruit smoothies, and we’ll make your folks feel special. Isn’t that the point?

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Health Care Partners, the largest physician-owned and led independent physicians association in the Northeast, serving the five boroughs and Long Island, knows how to do a perfect employee appreciation event.

After hiring Maui Wowi (that’s us) to provide smoothies and hot cocoa (because it’s March in New York, and you never know whether it will be frigid or like spring) the human resources team decided to do a Hawaiian theme employee appreciation event.

HCP promoted the event to employees and encouraged them to get into the mood and go Friday-extra-casual with Hawaiian shirts, which the staff complemented with leis. Our staff blended smoothies (kiwi lemon lime, tropical fruit and strawberry banana) for their 200 staff, and made Ghirardelli hot cocoas as well.

As you can see from the photos, the HCP team took the Hawaiian part seriously. (Especially the lady in red with the sunglasses!)

So what are the essentials for a successful employee appreciation event? Here are a few to get you started:

1. Promote, promote, promote: Signage in the hallways, break room, and other conspicuous places at least a week before the event. Email blast a few days before and then the day-of.
2. A theme is a plus: Coupling the employee appreciation event with a theme (like Hawaiian) adds to the fun of the event.
3. Decorate and accessorize: In the case of this event, a little bit of extra signage (“The tiki bar is open”) and leis given out by the HR staff as people arrive is a nice touch.

While March 1 was the official National Employee Appreciation Day, don’t restrict yourself to the date. Maui Wowi does employee appreciation events year round – espresso and hot cocoa drinks in winter, smoothies in the other seasons, and often both.

There are countless types of social events for which party-givers hiring catering services: weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, graduation parties, Sweet 16s, family reunions, summer backyard parties, and the list goes on. Maui Wowi Coffee & Smoothie Catering (that’s us, folks) has catered exactly 4,862 events since 2002 (we keep count). So we have seen it all. And there are a few things we’ve learned that we can pass on to you so that you’ll benefit when you decide to have a smoothie or espresso bar for your catered event.

Bar Mitzvah Madness

We once brought our mobile smoothie station to a lovely place along New York’s East River for a bar mitzvah. The parents of the young guest of honor made a dubious decision—to have all the kids at the party dropped off by parents and un-chaperoned. What could possibly go wrong?

We were hired to make our delicious smoothies for about 100 young teens (mostly boys). Our smoothies are made with our all-natural fruit and yogurt blends (we also have non-dairy) to which we add banana. These children were unusually rambunctious. And they very much liked bananas. In fact, many asked for a banana in addition to or instead of their smoothie. We were stationed outside the party room so we did not have a view to what was happening inside.

We probably made 200 smoothies and handed out 100 bananas – hey, we thought, these kids are really health-conscious! Later on when the parents came to pick up the kids and we were breaking down our bar, we saw where the bananas went. The kids made quite a game of stomping the bananas into the carpeting of this elegant restaurant, and having a grand old time slipping and sliding on banana peels.

I saw the event manager assessing the damage and he seemed unperturbed. I asked him how he was remaining so calm. He replied, “I just charged their parents’ credit card $20,000 for the cleaning service to come in after the party.”

We’ve also been to many bar/bar mitzvahs where the kids and the adults celebrate on different floors. That’s almost as bad an idea.

Moral of the story: Don’t ever have a bar mitzvah party that’s “just for the kids.” And hire a party company that specializes in kids’ parties. These folks know how to corral the youngsters into activities to keep them from making up their own games.

Weddings

Maui Wowi provides smoothies and espresso drinks for many weddings, and fortunately we’ve never had an incident like the Bar Mitzvah story above at any wedding we’ve catered. As long as 13-year-olds don’t get married, we should be fine.

Most people planning a wedding would not ordinarily think of a smoothie bar as something guests might like, but they’re missing out. While we’ve often set up our tiki bar on a beach or under a tent for a themed wedding, we’ve also done plenty of more formal (and black tie) weddings. Obviously, we don’t set up a tiki bar for those events. We use a more classic bar provided by the catering establishment or rental company. Same smoothies – with or without alcohol. (Our pina coladas with Malibu rum are something special.) Smoothies and frozen cocktails are especially nice for a late spring through early fall wedding when the weather is still warm, and when guests can be outside. We are able to serve several hundred smoothies per hour with two servers, so there are no lines and waiting.

Speaking of lines, we’ve been to some weddings as guests where smoothies or frozen cocktails were served. Caterers are great at a lot of things, but making smoothies is not one of them. We’ve seen amateurs forget to put the blender cap on before blending, and the result on a bride’s dress is something that once you’ve seen it you can never un-see. Also, people who don’t blend smoothies every day are sssslllllooooowwwww. And guests hate having to wait.

Another downside of just having your caterer blend the smoothies? They may use a truly terrible sugary smoothie mix rather than an all-natural blend with no artificial ingredients. We shop where caterers shop and the frozen smoothie blends that these wholesale restaurant warehouses stock are truly horrific. Your tastebuds and your guests will never forgive you. Maui Wowi smoothie blends are made in small batches by a privately-owned provider who’s been working with us for 30 years—not by the Industrial Food Complex. We’ve also seen those machines that churn frozen goop into smoothies, like in 7/Eleven. Would you really serve that to your guests? ‘Nuff said. Give them the good stuff.

What about espresso drinks?

Here again, caterers don’t do this and don’t want to be asked. But ask. They know us and we do a great job. Or call us directly. We can set up two high-production espresso machines with four servers and make 100+ lattes an hour—more than enough for most weddings. And our espresso beans are grown in Hawaii and custom roasted for us.

We’re often asked what kinds of corporate events we have provided our mobile coffee and smoothie catering services for. It would be a shorter list if we catalogued the types of events we haven’t catered. But here goes.

The most popular event type for our mobile smoothie and espresso bars in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area and beyond (including greater Philadelphia and New England) are employee appreciation events. Human resource managers (nowadays also called People managers – is HR still a PC term?) hire us the most frequently. With unemployment being historically low and competition for talent being at an all-time high, companies are doing whatever they can to keep their people happy. The best way to do it is to show appreciation – which many studies show is more remembered and valued that paid time off or a little extra money.

Corporate employees definitely remember Maui Wowi when we roll in with our tiki bar to make our smoothies, or with an elegant linen-covered table for our espresso service.

After employee appreciation days, the most popular event types for our mobile espresso bar and smoothie bar is client appreciation events. We are often hired by financial wholesalers who are calling on advisory firms. These salespeople drop by the offices of Morgan Stanley or Merrill Lynch to chat with the advisors and remind them about their products. It helps – a lot – to have something special to pry these advisors off the phone and into the break room or conference room for a few minutes of friendly soft-selling over a latte or a strawberry banana smoothie.

Next up is health and wellness events. Corporate HR managers and event planners in New York City and elsewhere love to have our smoothies to draw attendance to their health fairs. An important part of corporate wellness programs is actually getting people to walk through and talk to the participating vendors – everything from gyms and nutrition experts to yoga and acupuncture. Taking advantage of these services is another key aspect of employee retention. When Maui Wowi comes in with a smoothie bar, we work with the corporate event planner to promote our presence in advance. We’ll design signage and email flyers that will let people know we’re coming so they can get their free smoothie. And we serve 7-oz cups, so attendees can come back and try all our different flavors (we usually serve three at a time).

Planning something special for your employees to show them some love during the week of Valentine’s Day? It’ll be here before you know it – mark your calendars for the week of February 11, 2019 (the actual day is Feb. 14). Maui Wowi smoothie catering can make your employee appreciation event delicious and properly themed.

Valentine’s Day is great for employee appreciation events for lots of reasons – the most important of which is saying thank you to your staff. But it’s also super-easy to decorate for. Pink ribbons and cups, red leis – the possibilities are as endless as they are inexpensive.

As for our smoothie drinks, that’s the best part of tying in the fun holiday theme with employee appreciation. We have quite a number of plays on pink smoothie drinks: Strawberry Banana, of course. But when we combine strawberry banana with pina colada for a Strawberry Colada, we get a delicious smoothie that’s a lovely light pink. We also can blend Hawaiian Breeze – a combination of strawberry and mango/orange, which has an orange-red color.

Now what about a red cocktail umbrella and red paper straw to top it all off? That makes for a smoothie that definitely says “we love our people.”

To round it all out, our servers who will be blending your amazing smoothies will be clad in red Aloha shirts, and we can also decorate our bar with any other gifts, giveaways, decorations or signage you’d like to provide. If you plan your event in advance it would be easy to procure napkins, cups and other items with your company logo – an even more thoughtful way to recognize and show you appreciate your employees.