Mocktails, Sig Bevs, and LTOs—Oh My?
Welcome to Operator Notes, a new weekly newsletter written by coffee operators, consultants, creators, and practitioners who spot trends and share insight on what to do about them.
This week’s edition is written by Garrett Oden, publisher at Fresh Cup.
✉️ Operator Notes: practical advice from people working in coffee.
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Menu Innovation Is Becoming Table Stakes
The home coffee bar is slowly upstaging the coffee shop. With more affordable espresso equipment, coffee concentrates, and widely available well-roasted coffee, consumers can create more home recipes than ever before.
If customers can make more drinks at home, that’s one less reason to visit the cafe. Where does that leave the coffee shop?
This may be why there’s an ever-increasing focus on menu innovation and limited time offers (LTOs) in cafes. Baristas are still well-equipped to create drinks that would be difficult to pull off at home, but the bar is constantly climbing. We see a growing number of shops working with fresh herbs, whole fruits, infused oils, and syrups made for a single season to keep customers on their toes.
Discourse Coffee in Milwaukee rotates four new drinks every six weeks. Be Bright in Los Angeles ran a strawberry-themed menu around Valentine’s Day that turned out to be its most popular menu of the year. Mnemonic Coffee is San Diego explicitly markets ‘zero-proof drink space‘. The best local drinks I’ve had recently include a matcha mojito from Fleet Coffee and Lamppost Coffee’s spicy pear nitro tonic.
Double Down on the Seasonal Menu
There are a few things you can do to make sure your seasonal menus pull their weight..
Get the Flavor Bible. This is a great read for exploring flavor combinations you might not have otherwise encountered. Keep it handy as a reference for staff.
Keep a drink log. Record your seasonal drinks in a spreadsheet: the full ingredient list, recipe, and what you charged for each drink. At the end of the season, add feedback from staff and customers, along with your sales data. Ask your baristas: how easy was the drink to make? How did our customers rate it? Record drink sales and revenue for each drink. After a few seasons, you’ll see patterns and be able to build on your company history, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Plan two months out. Fall menus are rolling out, but it’s not too early to start thinking about winter menus. Rolling out a menu late is a bad look, but more importantly, your team will do a better job at developing great recipes, ordering ingredients, and creating promotional materials if they aren’t in a rush. Need inspiration? Check out Tastewise’s LTO calendar.
Run a seasonal drink competition with your baristas. This is one of my favorite approaches I’ve seen: the team develops drinks, everyone tastes and votes, and the results inform the menu. Leadership can keep the final say, and you’ll get more diverse drinks with stories behind them (always good for marketing). You’ll also get a staff that’s invested in selling the menu they helped build.
Go Deeper
How Coffee Shops Are Breaking The Rules To Create Signature Drinks
Klatch, Mr. Espresso, and Fairgrounds on drinks that don’t resemble anything else on the menu.
These Coffee Shops Are Winning With Mocktails: Here’s How (With Recipes)
Three cafes on pricing, margins, and the basic formula for building a zero-proof drink.
The Power, Magic, and Wonder of House-made Syrups
Discourse and Broken Board on how a seasonal syrup gets developed, and how long it takes.
Fruit’s Crashing the Coffee Party
Be Bright, Verve, and Dr. Ink on balancing fruit against espresso’s own acidity and bitterness.
Tea Refreshers Are Winning Over the Non-Coffee Crowd
How one Texas shop got to 30% of drink sales from refreshers using syrups it already stocked.
