Covid-19 put café culture on pause, but coffee culture continues. Judging from the midtown Manhattan lines at Starbucks, Bluestone Lane and Joe (which are the ones I’ve seen re-open as of writing), people are making up for lost lattes as cafes reopen for digital orders. But what’s a café when it’s limited to a takeout window? Here are five ideas I’d love to see cafes introduce to reimagine coffee culture for remote consumers:
Teach brewing techniques for tips via a barista hot line. My WeWork has terrible batch brewed coffee, but my coworkers complain that their homebrew is worse. Cafes could service them by being more proactive teachers.
What if Joe Coffee or Verve Coffee — any café-roaster with a loyal following — gave customers limited-time access to a coffee text hotline after buying a bag of beans? Each bag would come with a QR code that directed the purchaser to an app or texting hotline where they could ask a barista how to brew. Need step-by-step help on perfecting a pour-over? Video call with the barista, then tip via an automated pop-up screen.
This hotline model is already in place at cookware companies like Equal Parts and Great Jones, which give customers access to a hotline for a limited time following purchase.
Spotlight the farmers so that people listen. Despite the direct-to-farmer relations that many roasters have, these stories are lost on 99% of customers. And I get it. People are used to thinking about coffee as a commodity. But even printing a photo of the farmer on the bag and featuring one-sentence description of the farm could boost customer awareness.
If cafes increase customer awareness, then they’ll be able to charge more for their coffee. One of the best models I’ve seen is from Bellwether Coffee, which makes an in-café roaster that contains a touchscreen for featuring information about the beans being roasted and the farm they come from. This touchscreen also has a tip feature so motivated customers can contribute some money to their farmer.
Explore non-Italian coffee culture. Starbucks did an excellent job of Americanizing Italian coffee culture and charting a path for growth around the world — I truly admire them for it. But cafes have remained too loyal to this format. There are a few exceptions, like All Day in Miami and New York’s Felix Roasting Company.
More cafes should differentiate themselves by pushing their menu beyond varying ratios of espresso + hot milk. Why not experiment with spice-tinged cold brew, fruit-spiked cascara sodas and ginger-rosemary lemonade? Remember how dalgona coffee blew up in early lockdown (so long ago…or was it yesterday…) — what will win as consumers continue to reinvent their routines?
Invest in niche networking tools. Coffee shops love to boast about their community, but especially in big cities it feels superficial. Is a barista remembering that someone’s order really community? It’s not, and cafés can change this.
Cafes could start their own niche networking groups that give ultra-loyal customers a place to meet and connect. These groups could leverage social media sites, like private Facebook groups, Whatsapp or Instagram DMs. Maybe your order twin always arrives an hour earlier, this app would give you a space to meet.
This can’t be a passive experience, but an interactive reimagining of the café experience. Cafes will need to host digital events by tapping into the talent of their community. Throw a digital open mic night, coordinate a book club or host a seminar series. This community will increase customer loyalty, which as we’re seeing is essential to keeping money flowing in.
We’re already seeing an incredibly clever initiative called Coffee Break, which invites coffee enthusiasts around the US to daily Zoom chats based on their location. There’s no structure for conversations. Instead, they aim to stoke idealised free-flowing café conversations.
Make to-go formats compelling. I love coffee and coffee shops, but the one I’ve visited the most in the past two years has been the to-go kiosk in Bryant Park. I could go to the Café Grumpy down the block or the Blue Bottle inside my office building, but the snaking lines and cramped spaces are no match for waiting outside in a well-manicured park for my single-origin batch brew. And this was before cramped spaces became a threat to public health.
Many cafes will fail as customers no longer want to linger, but kiosks could help some shops keep serving. While most US cities aren’t equipped to quickly transition to takeaway windows, integrating into pre-existing stores (yes, like the inevitable, stereotypical barber shop-coffee shop hybrid), operating a luxury street cart like Peddler used to or even taking over unoccupied space like Bandit could chart a path forward.
The high-quality hospitality that distinguishes the best cafes will need to be reimagined to serve the ultra-grab-and-go lifestyle, whether that means artist-designed paper cups, an ultra-mouthwatering array of portable food or barista name tags. Cafes will need to build out a compelling story around a single transaction, making sure there’s enough barista-customer interaction to keep the experience memorable, but not so much it becomes drawn out.
There’s no easy path forward for café culture, but I believe that we’ve integrated these third spaces and the beverages they serve so fully into our lives that we won’t allow them to disappear. They’ll vastly change scope and their numbers will vastly shrink, but a more customer-tuned, inventive industry will emerge.