Old Spike Opens Seventh London Café and Optimises Square’s Software to Power New Live Transaction-Linked Impact Dashboard
The community café chain partners with Square to power interactive dashboard showing how purchases across Old Spike's seven cafés support training and employment for people experiencing homelessness
LONDON, October 21, 2026--Old Spike, a London specialty coffee roaster and social enterprise, has opened its seventh London café in Southwark. The new Great Suffolk Street location displays what it believes to be the UK hospitality industry's first live impact dashboard powered by global payments platform, Square.
Old Spike's central mission is to create employment for people experiencing homelessness. Its Barista Training and Employment Programme provides practical training, paid work placements and support into lasting work. Since opening in 2015, over 350 people have completed its training course.
The dashboard uses Square data to display to customers how their purchases across Old Spike's seven cafés contribute to its training and paid work placement programme. Southwark is the first café to feature the dashboard, which Old Spike plans to roll out across all its sites.
When a purchase is made, Square automatically sends the information to the Impact Dashboard system, which records the transaction and calculates the relevant impact measures and KPIs. These figures are turned into visuals via an animation application so they can be displayed on public-facing screens. The dashboard showcases the number of trainees completing the programme, graduates securing lasting employment and the amount paid during work placements.
The clear and engaging animations for the dashboard screens were created by motion & data-visualization studio Algo, which developed a modular animation system powered by Rive, the same technology behind Spotify's world-famous Wrapped campaign. Algo contributed its work pro bono to support the fight against homelessness.
Hadi, who received training through the programme, and now works at The Breakfast Club, one of Old Spike's employment partners, reflects on his experience: "Old Spike's training programme gave me both practical skills and confidence which I now use on a daily basis. Being given this opportunity meant that I didn't need to go through a daunting employment screening process as I was able to transfer the skills I gained from the initial programme."
Richard Robinson, CEO of Old Spike, said: "Old Spike was founded to do two things: roast exceptional coffee and create real paths into employment for people experiencing homelessness.