I Saw the Future of Coffee and I'm Buzzing!

Wish Lids! The cococano!! REVENGE OF THE TIN CAN!!!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Issue #109 of CAFÉ ANNE!

I got a lot of feedback on last week’s feature, “Too Smart for Mensa!” a look at five geniuses and their experiences joining ultra-high-IQ societies. Many readers echoed their suggestion that a bonkers IQ is no guarantee of happiness or success—and can even work against you. “Such a good reminder that while we might perceive a person with certain gifts—intelligence, money, looks—it doesn't mean their life is great,” wrote reader Michael J.

Others, meanwhile, were inspired to test their own IQ, including Maria in Williamsburg, who took a ten-minute online test while cooking dinner. “I was slightly disappointed in the score, but a) I WAS making dinner after all and b) it turns out by the time one hits my age, their IQ can drop by 2-3 points. So with those two handicaps, I feel a little better about my ability to tell one set of shapes from another,” she wrote.

Intrigued, I tried taking a quickie online IQ test myself. Am I smart enough to join an ultra-high IQ society? Let’s just say I’m smart enough to get into CAFÉ ANNE, and so are you!

Meanwhile, huge Godzilla-Wins-an-Oscar shoutouts to new paid subscribers Alison T. and Glenn R. That’s enough $$$ to see this super-fun movie seven more times! And needless to say, your generous support helps ensure CAFÉ ANNE stays free for everybody—no paywalls!

I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. I reported on a NYC trade show dedicated to all things coffee. Could life get any better? Nooooooo. Please enjoy.

Regards!

Anne

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FEATURE

I Saw the Future of Coffee and I’m Buzzing!

I love coffee, I love trade shows, and I love New York City. So when I saw CoffeeFest, the big industry show for caffeine heads was at the Javitz Convention Center last week, I knew I had to go.

I finagled myself a press pass (the newsletter name finally came in handy!) and went to the trade show's website for some advance recognizance.

"Attended by baristas, coffee shop owners, coffee roasters and distributors, CoffeeFest is the Business Resource for the Specialty Coffee Community," it said.

Organized by Clarion Events—also the company behind the Caravan and Motorhome Show, the Smoky Mountain Gift Show and India Utility Week—CoffeeFest would feature 161 exhibitors, latte art demonstrations in the "Barista Playground," and presentations on topics such as "AI for Coffee Shops."

Oh boy!

I arrived Tuesday morning, the last day of the show, and scanned the vast exhibit hall. "Wow, does it smell like coffee. Holy crap!" I said into my dictaphone.

Late for the start of the day's first lecture, "Drink Trends," I walked in on the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. The speaker, who employed the term "gillenials" to refer to both Gen Zs and Millennials, said 64% of folks in this age group believe drinking cold brew is a "cool and trendy thing to do."

I learned about taste trends:

"Hazelnut is taking over cinnamon!"

Also:

"Lavender is not going away!"

The news got worse:

"Pumpkin spice is here to stay!"

I scanned the room. It was mostly folks in jeans and hoodies—café owners, I assumed. They were taking careful notes.

"People are searching for beverages that make them feel good when their feelings are overwhelming," said the presenter.

The cafe owners jotted this down.

"The next generation is looking for fun and funky beverages for social hour!" we learned.

A new PowerPoint slide appeared overhead: "Fun with Fungi."

"Mushrooms are entering the coffeehouse world!” said the presenter.

It was time to brave the trade show floor.

The first exhibit to catch my eye was Roastar, a Wisconsin company that makes custom retail packaging mainly for small, independent coffee roasters.

The new trend? Tin cans are back! said sales rep Adrienne Dallman. It's a retro thing, of course.

Cool custom coffee cans!

The problem with cans, said Ms. Dallman, is they take up a lot of space—many roasters reserve them for special occasions. Also, they're expensive—$4 each!

"But that includes the printing," said Ms. Dallman.

Custom-printed pouches and bags, meanwhile, cost up to $2 each. I was starting to see why beans from small roasters are so expensive.

"You can go overseas and get the bags cheaper, but we have quick lead times, and being made in the U.S. is what our customers are looking for," said Ms. Dallman.

She gave me her business card. Under her title, it said, "Hen of Hearts," so I asked about that.

"I have chickens!" she said. "I started with twelve and now I'm down to nine."

"Did you eat them?" I asked.

"No," said Ms. Dallman. "It was coyotes and foxes. And my dog. He was a Goldendoodle and liked to chase things."

"I hate it when my pets eats each other," I said.

"I know!" said Ms. Dallman.

Next was Vita Coco, the coconut water company founded 21 years ago right here in NYC. Hoping to persuade cafés to use coconut beverages in their coffee drinks, they were serving Americanos made with coconut water along with iced coconut milk cappuccinos.

Ray Hernandez, the company's Director of Coffee, was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt that said, "Coffee." I asked him why we didn't see more cafés offering coconut milk.

Ray and his coffee friends!

"Funny enough, coconut milk was one of the first plant-based milks. Soy and coconut milk was what you could find for years, especially in the 90s," said Mr. Hernandez. "I think things flipped over to almond in the early 2000s. Then oat milk, obviously, post-2016. So we're trying to reaffirm our space within the coffee world. It's not that coconut milk is coming back. We've been here. We've just been a little ignored."

"You're the OG milk alternative!" I said.

"Absolutely!" said Mr. Hernandez.

"Who came up with the idea for the Americano with coconut water?" I asked.

"That was me!" said Mr. Hernandez. "I said, 'This would probably taste really good.' And in fact, it does. You get hydration and the sweetness to balance the espresso."

"They should call it the Hernandez,” I said.

"Haha, that's not a bad idea," said Mr. Hernandez. "But I think 'cococano' is the name. It's cute, right?"

The typical café offers customers a choice of three plant-based milks these days—soy, oat and a nut milk, he said, But they're shelf-stable, so there's no reason to limit the options.

"You know what I like best?" I said. "Half-n-half! What do you put in your coffee?"

Mr. Hernandez said he switches between almond and coconut. "I try not to drink one type of plant-based milk always," he said. "Too much of a good thing is not good."

"Except when it comes to half-n-half!” I said.

"You know," said Mr. Hernandez, "I've been on plant-based milks so long, cows' milk is just not a flavor I enjoy anymore."

"You've ruined yourself," I said.

"I have," he said. "I really have."

There were as many alt-milk purveyors on the floor as there were coffee roasters. I saw folks promoting oat milk, keto milk and "animal-free dairy milk" with "real dairy protein."

Among them was Pacific Foods, a division of $9 billion food giant Campbell's, offering its “barista series” of plant milks. I tried a sample of its hemp milk. The color of putty, it had a grainy taste and texture.

"Hemp came out in January 2020. Great time to release a new product," said Nathaniel May, senior manager for training and specialty coffee.

Pacific tries to release a new plant milk whenever possible, he said—to expand the range of folks who can enjoy coffee. Almond milk is great, but not if you have a nut allergy!

Some milks fare better than others, he said. Pacific's barista-series rice milk, released in 2017, for example, was a flop.

"It was cream and rich, it steamed really well." said Mr. May. "Great in coffee! But the timing of that launch ran right up against Oatly's entrance into the New York City market. It was like, 'Hey, what about oat milk? Maybe not rice milk after all!' It was a really high quality product, but it was never able to find its footing against the tsunami of oat that came into the market."

He looked a little sad about the oat milk tsunami, so I asked how the hemp milk was selling.

"It hasn't enjoyed the broad adoption that oat has had," said Mr. May. "But I don't think anything will enjoy the broad adoption that oat has. Everyone seems to be interested in looking for the next oat, and I don't know that there is the next oat."

At trade shows, I always worry for the lonely exhibitors stuck with bad booth locations. So I couldn't resist when Yousef Awadh and Mohammed Alshwabali waved me over to check out their tiny Bronx roasting company, Alshawabali Trading Corp. It offers coffee grown in Yemen!

Yousef Awadh and Mohammed Alshwabali

Mr. Awadh, the company's salesman, had a question: Did I know that Yemen was the birthplace of coffee?

He recounted a story about a sufi who accidentally roasted some coffee beans, thereby inventing my favorite drug. "It started to become a religion," he said.

"I'll say!" I said.

Yemen had a coffee monopoly for 700 years, said Mr. Awadh. Now, he and his boss were planning to restore their homeland to coffee industry dominance.

"All we need to do is raise awareness," he said. "We have a beautiful coffee."

I tried a sampled the dark roast. Yep! Really good coffee!

"It's very complex, like its people," said Mr. Awadh. Then he added a dark and funny joke that I shall not repeat here.

He also offered to brew me sample of Yemen's national drink, a spiced tea called Qisher.

"I don't want to hear about tea," I said.

But this was different, he protested. It's a tea brewed from coffee bean husks!

"The husk has more caffeine it, more energy!" said Mr. Awadh. "It's good for the skin, too."

I didn't have time to wait for tea, but Mr. Alshwabali gave me a free bag of husks to brew at home. I'll let you know how that went in the next issue!

At the far end of the exhibit hall, in the “Cupping Corner,” former barista Ari Fasanella was offering coffee samples from local roasters, including a brew from Flux on Long Island.

I took a sip.

"That's weird coffee!" I said. It tasted like a fruity Belgian beer.

"100 percent, 100 percent,” said Mr. Fasanella, a salesman for Cafe Imports, a Minneapolis bean importer. He explained it was anaerobically processed—fermented in a sealed container without oxygen.

"This is all the rage right now within the specialty community," he said. "All the roasters are calling importers like us and asking, 'What do you have for anaerobics? What do you have for anaerobics?' And we're like, 'Okay, I guess we'll start sourcing anaerobics, because people want them."

He was initially puzzled by the trend: "Why do you need these coffees? They're such intense flavors. They're divisive. People either love it or they hate it."

But it’s the first vogue to come along in a while that changes one's idea of what coffee can be.

"Like naturally-processed Ethiopian coffee ten years ago," he said. 'Everyone was like, 'Whoa!' Now, anaerobic is the new, big, exciting, very bold, easy-to-distinguish, easy-to-discern flavor. It gets people thinking, 'This is different from what I get at the bodega, or whatever."

"So you can shock and awe your customers," I said.

"Exactly. I think that's the main use. The other half is just roasters like nerdier coffee processing."

And now, anaerobic beans are coming to a cafe near you. "Any random city in North America—say there's ten specialty roasters—I bet you it's on 6-to-8 of their lineups right now," said Mr. Fasanella.

Okay! We've been warned!

I've always been fascinated by ultra-niche biz software. There's software designed for churches, for example, and software for dog kennels and software just for hair salons. So I was delighted to stumble on Dripos, "an operating system for coffee shops." The company is based in NYC, of course!

Sales exec Jonna O'Sullivan explained that Dripos, which costs cafés $149 a month per location, handles payment transactions, inventory, label printing, payroll, scheduling, marketing, even loyalty programs. "It's pretty cool stuff!" she said.

"This is very simple, but one of my favorite features—you can create an opening, mid-day and closing checklist for your team,” she added.

I read the sample checklist aloud: "Grind beans, take out trash, check drawer amount, clean countertops."

The company, launched a few years ago, already has 500 shops on its platform. "We're growing like crazy!" she said.

At the other end of the startup spectrum was Caroline Curry, a marketing student at Hunter tending a booth for her mother, Alison Curry. Mom had invented a new kind of plastic coffee cup lid—it holds a little candle.

Caroline Curry and the Wish Lid!

"It's for your birthday, or if you're having a bad day," said Caroline.

Caroline runs the Instagram account for her mother's fledgling company, Wish Lids. Mom, an Upper West Side consultant, has patented the invention. They were at the trade show looking for a manufacturer.

"So a coffee shop could offer this to customers for their birthdays, or on bad days. What else?" I said.

"Anniversaries," said Caroline. "Or just for fun."

"So it's a little like having a cupcake with a candle," I said.

"Without the cupcake, yes," said Caroline.

Over-caffeinated to the extreme, I was on my way out when I noticed a strange sight—an exhibit of milk from cows.

"You sell milk!" I said, laughing.

"Yep, that's right," said the man at the booth. "I'm a dairy farmer."

Jim Davenport

Jim Davenport is the fourth-generation owner of Tollgate Farm in Ancramdale, NY. "'Tollgate,' like the booths on the highways before big brother took over," he said.

His spread, which includes 70 milk-producing Holsteins, has teamed with six other small dairies to create Hudson Valley Fresh, a co-op supplying milk to groceries and coffee shops all over NYC.  

The coop also provided all the milk at the trade show: "Every latte made with real milk is ours,” he said.

"What do you put in your coffee?" I asked.

"When I start milking at 3:30 in the morning, I need the caffeine," said Mr. Davenport. "I use Folgers Instant. We have 180-degree water that we wash up with, so I use the hot water to make a little instant, put a little sugar in, and right now I'm using a cow called 'Peacock,' —a 5% butterfat Holstein—and I squirt the milk right in. It foams up really well. I can make a homemade latte just like that!"

"That's the craziest coffee routine I've ever heard," I said.

"I would hope so!" said Mr. Davenport.

CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday!