Each year, a new summer specialty seems to become a staple of Australia’s café landscape. How can venues be prepared to take advantage of next favourite summer flavour?
Finding the next great café trend is a powerful difference-maker for cafés. Achieving social media virality with the next hit beverage is a goal plenty of venues may set themselves, but few actually achieve.
Underneath those globally successful, viral trends is a movement within the coffee landscape. The prevalence of flavours, powders, sweet sauces, and alternative ingredients has given rise to a whole new subsector of the café world. No longer, it seems, is a strong coffee offering enough to stay on top of the current market.
With its roots in Sydney’s Sutherland shire, roaster White Horse Coffee supplies coffee to hundreds of cafés in the region, along with operating five of its own. It has its finger on the pulse of one the trendiest metropolitan demographics in Australia.
Head Coffee Trainer Adam Blake has been with the business for a decade and has seen firsthand the difference to the market high-quality specialty and signature beverages has made.
“In the 10-year span I’ve been with White Horse, the industry has changed heaps,” says Adam. “In terms of consumer tastes and how they’ve changed over time, there’s a far bigger appreciation for variety and choice in general.
“This is reflected in the growth of alternative milks as well, when I started there was only soy and almond, but now there’s oat, macadamia, and lactose-free across a range of competitors and that is now seen as the standard.
“The same trend is happening now in specialty and signature drinks, and it’s even happening in coffee with new methods such as cherry or mango co-fermented coffee. “It’s re-awoken a consumer market looking for different flavours and ingredients in their drinks.”
While Adam says coffee is still being used in the same way it has always been, new takes on old techniques are changing the way cold drinks are consumed.
“Everything that is old is new again. Things like frappe, dalgona coffee, and Japanese cold brew a rising in popularity,” says Adam.
“Australians have not traditionally been accepting of chilled coffee drinks, but it’s becoming far more accepted, which allows us to put more energy into brewing chilled drinks that express different flavour nuances in the cup.”
Flavour meets fashion
The rise of specialty drinks and demand for colourful, sweeter options is seen as a potential competitor to the established coffee scene in some corners, but the assumption that Generation Z has formed vastly different habits to older consumers is more than backed up.
Recent data from an alternative dairy brand has found almost half (46 per cent) of Gen Z consumers are motivated to photograph or video their drinks based on appearance.
While taste (30 per cent) is still the main motivation for trying something new for this surveyed cohort, it’s not as important as one might think. Novelty (29 per cent), and aesthetic (26 per cent) barely trail what is typically seen as the main reason for trying something new.
Adam believes while the younger generation may be steering away from traditional coffee beverages, coffee-based specialty drinks that take advantage of ingredients such as flavours and powders offer these consumers a gateway into traditional coffee consumption.
“What you’re doing by offering these different options for people is you’re creating more access to different drinks and promoting inclusivity of tastes. Someone might be ready to drink a caramel latte – which is where I started before I really got into coffee,” he says.
“In a few years’ time these people who are being introduced to coffee through these different drinks could be drinking an espresso or a filter, and that’s a transition I’ve seen happen.”
The importance of coffee alternatives and cold beverages as an opportunity to appeal to a broader audience and indulge existing customers is not lost on Adam.
“It’s a gateway, and that choice is a gateway into appreciating other things. Anything that draws the guest into the café and enables them to feel comfortable and understood, that’s really the care of hospitality,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter what the choice of the individual is, just that it’s available for when they want it.”
Staying on-trend
Whether it be drinks such as matcha that have become staples of the modern café scene, or banana lattes and cloud coffee that burn bright, but burn fast on social media, locking in on the virality of new and popular beverages is a critical aspect of the modern café landscape.
“If you can’t pivot onto a trend when it’s happening and if you’re not an early mover, you’re not moving at all,” says Adam. “Now there are businesses that are built purely off matcha. There’s one in Cronulla called Maker’s Daily – their whole business model is matcha first and coffee second, so they’ve inverted what we would do.
“If you don’t offer those specialty sweet drinks now you risk fading into obscurity. You don’t just want to blend in with every other café, and everyone has that challenge of trying to differentiate themselves and stand out.”
As a large-scale coffee roaster that runs five cafés, White Horse is in a different situation than many of Australia’s venues, but Adam says the business has still been able to benefit from hype around these viral hits.
“As a coffee roaster it’s important to remain aware of these trends, but as a business that operates cafés we serve coffee in, it’s critical to be able to jump on those trends when they pop up,” he says.
“There’s incredible potential in it. With how the younger generations have had this huge uptake of these signature drinks and how they trend on social media, it’s almost self-promoting, because when the influencers get behind them it creates this huge momentum. That momentum can really shift those forces in the market quite easily.
“Our previous summer menu had a drink called a Salted Caramel Surprise. We used salted caramel sauce with a shot of espresso, it was steamed with milk and then poured over ice. It was a super textural and it was awesome. We’ve also used matcha powder and strawberry sauce to make our own high-quality version of the heavily trending iced strawberry matcha drink.”
White Horse has partnered with Naked Syrups since before the turn of the decade to help craft drinks such as the Salted Caramel Surprise. Adam says the partnership between the businesses has been so successful because of the alignment of their values.
“We’ve been with them pretty much from the start back in 2019. They’re really forward thinkers, and the quality and consistency of their product and diversity of their range speaks for itself,” he says.
“It’s honestly rare to find another business that shares so many similar core values to what you have, such as good service, great product, and exceptional quality, the same sorts of things we would strive for as a coffee roastery, they seem to have nailed.
“Natural flavours and colours, being Australian-made and gluten-free, those are important to people too, and they’re a company that just nails it.”
Looking ahead
With the height of summer approaching in the Southern Hemisphere, what cements itself as the new great summer trend is yet to be seen. Will iced matcha continue its rise as a popular coffee alternative, or will cold pressed juices and functional beverages prove a bigger hit with health-conscious consumers?
Adam says while he’s not sure what the future holds, it’s worth looking at how past trends have evolved to identify some of the next great market movers and shakers.
“Even a year or two ago in summer, cold pressed juices were the biggest sellers for us, and now I see that shifting into more flavour-based drinks. With iced tea and matcha, it’s a pretty even split now,” he says.
“I can see the real, tangible success of those drinks. If we only sold one or two a week, they wouldn’t be on the menu because they wouldn’t justify their position. Seeing more ingredients on a café menu, including things like pistachio, is awesome as not everybody enjoys coffee.
“It’s self-evident because those drinks are on menus they’re still gaining traction, they’re gaining momentum. People aren’t just buying them, they’re appreciating them.”
What’s on the horizon, though, could be anybody’s guess – but Adam is predicting the continuing popularity of matcha to make further waves in café and retail markets.
“We saw a huge trend of cold RTD drinks in supermarkets trend recently, and those iced coffee brands were really cool when they hit the shelves, and grab and go options in cafés became more popular,” he says.
“These grab and go products style of products are something that gains momentum easily. It will be interesting to see what the future holds, but there’s a lot of potential for change.”
For more information, visit nakedsyrups.com.au.
This article appears in the December 2025 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
