MONIN is on a mission to shake up the beverage market and prove there’s more to syrups than caramel lattes and hazelnut hot chocolates.
Syrups are a stalwart of international café culture, providing a shot of sweetness in iced coffees and a touch of nuttiness to lattes. However, the team of flavour specialists at MONIN are eager to show baristas there’s a lot more to the brand – and that its range of more than 100 syrups might just be the key to unlocking creativity.
“We don’t just want to be thought of as brightly coloured syrups or get bogged down in the world of hazelnut lattes,” says John Davidson, Advocacy and Innovation Manager at Stuart Alexander, Australian distributor of MONIN syrups.
“Instead, we want to keep agitating the market with creative innovations. We want to shock and jar people, exceeding their expectations.”
As a long-term exhibitor at Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE), John and the MONIN team use the Southern Hemisphere’s leading coffee event as an opportunity to flex the brand’s creative muscles and show the industry MONIN’s true colours. Each year, their presence is bigger, brighter, and more creative than the last.
For the 2024 edition in May, John was keen to give attendees a lasting impression of MONIN that challenged any assumptions they might have. He got in touch with Nawar Adra of Stitch Coffee in Sydney, with whom the brand has collaborated on many occasions, and asked him to help craft something that would get MICE attendees talking.
“Nawar has been at the forefront of roasting, technology, and coffee innovation in Australia for years. For me and many other people he’s been a guiding voice, so he was the perfect person for the job,” says John.
Since releasing watermelon and yuzu infused cold brews at its Sydney cafés, Stitch Coffee has gained attention for its innovative signature drinks crafted with MONIN syrups. John knew Nawar was up to the challenge of developing something special for MICE, so he gave him a brief to create a canned cold-brew drink that captured Melbourne’s coffee scene. It needed to pique baristas’ interests, spark creativity, and trigger a touch of competitiveness.
“I wanted it to be a little bit jarring. It had to be good enough that the drinker thought it was delicious, but with room for them to think they could do better themselves,” says John.
The creative task force started playing around with flavours, running Stitch coffees with a kaleidoscope of fruity and herbaceous syrups. After many trial runs, blueberry was the flavour that stuck.
“The idea of using blueberry was sparked by my first ever visit to MICE in 2017. Ona Coffee had a line-up of black coffees that they were serving alongside different pairings, and my favourite was the one served with blueberries. The powdery flavour of blueberries really worked with the tannins of the black coffee as it cooled,” says John.
Nawar blended MONIN’s blueberry syrup with Stitch’s Black Field Blend coffee concentrate, adding a touch of saline solution and distilled citric acid to balance and brighten the drink.
“To stand up to the blueberry flavour, we needed a coffee that had a lot of body but little acidity. The Black Field concentrate worked well because its combination of Brazil and Papua New Guinea beans delivers smooth chocolate, caramel, and hazelnut characteristics. The addition of the citric acid helped to highlight the blueberry notes and coffee flavours,” says Nawar.
Packaged in 250-millimetre cans, the blueberry cold-brew was an all-out hit. The stock of 1000 cans produced for MICE were depleted before the three-day expo ended, with attendees coming back for second and third helpings.
For Nawar, seeing the success of the canned cold-brew at MICE has reinforced the notion that Australia is ready for more signature drinks and creative ready-to-drink (RTD) beverages.
“We’ve been trialling some new RTD drinks. We’ve got a lemonade fizz that’s in production, which is similar to the yuzu cold brew we serve in our cafés. We think our customers are going to love a line of cold brews infused with fruit notes; people love being able to detect flavours and say, ‘that’s blueberry’,” he says.
Both John and Nawar believe Australia is on the cusp of a signature drinks revolution, inspired by coffee markets in Asia which like to play around with flavour.
“I believe there’s a new wave of signature drinks in Australia. It’s only going to get bigger moving forward. After Starbucks paved the way with frappes, making iced beverages more valuable than its hot beverages, I think specialty coffee shops are going to adopt this kind of thinking too,” says Nawar.
“There’s a new audience who are bored of iced lattes. We want to highlight that you can pair a syrup with a high-quality coffee to create a drink that’s not complicated to make but fun to drink.”
According to John, while the world used to look to Melbourne and Sydney for coffee trends, the rise of the internet means there’s now a lot more international crossover, so trends are often of a global nature rather than national.
“The internet has made the beverage world a much smaller place, so global trends are at their peak,” he says.
“However, I’m hearing about roasters in places such as South Korea where cafés are serving 15 or more signature drinks. It’s really cool and a international trend we’re going to see more of.”
John and team are already planning their next trick for MICE2025, which takes place in March, with more creative showcases up their sleeve.
“Ultimately, MONIN is all about creativity. We want to be the reason people take a picture of their drink or try something outside of their comfort zone,” says John.
For more information, click here.
This article appears in the August/September 2024 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
