Why the average café customer doesn’t exist

Pablo & Rusty’s surveyed 750 Australians to get a lay of the land about the country’s café culture. CEO Abdullah Ramay dives into the results.

Most café operators are still making decisions about pricing, menu and growth on instinct. Local competition, what worked last year, the fear of scaring off the regulars are used as guiding principles.

For three years now Pablo & Rusty’s has run a national consumer survey to give the industry better data to work with. The 2026 wave reached 750 Australians, weighted to ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics), June 2024 population data on state, age and gender. 23 questions on behaviour, attitude and willingness to pay. 95 per cent confidence. ±3.6 per cent margin of error.

The most important finding isn’t a number. It’s an idea, and here’s the data behind it.

The industry keeps asking the wrong question.

Café owners ask: how do we get customers to spend more? That’s Wrong question. It assumes one customer. There isn’t one.

The right question: which customers, on what?

Different customers want different things. Different prices. Different rituals. Different reasons. Plan for that.

Build for one customer and you build for nobody. Build for five and you start to build something.

Meet the five Australian coffee customers.

Each customer defined by what they actually do, not what they say about themselves.

Specialty Enthusiasts (27 per cent). The home connoisseurs. Beans from a roaster, not a supermarket. Subscriptions. They care where the beans came from and who roasted them. Coffee is a thing they think about.

Casual Drinkers (24 per cent). Third-space led. They came for the table, the wi-fi, the recognition from the barista. The coffee is the entry fee.

Engaged Mainstream (20 per cent). Daily, value-aware. Café weekly or more. They know the word ‘specialty’. But at home they still buy supermarket beans. Your conversion audience.

Non-Category (16 per cent). Outside the cafe market. Coffee-curious. Slow to convert. Most cafés write them off too fast.

Convenience Regulars (14 per cent). Speed and routine. Under 90 seconds. Same drink, every day. Coffee is functional. Don’t try to upsell them.

Five segments. Five rituals. Five rates of change.

One menu can’t serve all five.

Two questions. Four customers.

Strip the five segments down to two questions:

Does this customer care about taste?

Are they price sensitive?

That gives you four corners. Each one wants a different cafe.

Connoisseurs. High taste. Low price sensitivity. The 27 per cent Specialty Enthusiasts live here. Be obsessive about the craft. Price barely registers.

The squeeze. High taste, high price sensitivity. 20 per cent Engaged Mainstream. The hardest quadrant to serve well. They notice quality. They notice the price tag. You earn them by being unmistakably worth the premium.

Just need a coffee. Convenience Regulars at 14 per cent. Speed. Routine. Same drink every day. Don’t try to teach them about origin.

Comfort buyers. The 16 per cent Non-Category. They don’t care much about taste or price. Most cafés can’t justify chasing them.

Casual Drinkers sit in the middle. Taste matters, but they’re flexible. They flow toward whichever quadrant the café near them serves.

There is no right price for a flat white. There are five.

Specialty Enthusiasts will pay $6.60. Convenience Regulars draw the line at $4.80. Same drink. $1.80 of difference.

That gap isn’t a curiosity. It’s the margin you’re leaving on the table by pricing for the middle.

The instinct is to find one number that works for everyone. There isn’t one. Price for the customer you’re actually serving. Not the average of all of them.

This is your job. Not your customer’s. Not your accountant’s. Yours.

Half your future customers don’t drink hot coffee.

Customers under 28 years of age, prefer to drink cold drinks more often than hot ones.

Eighteen to 21 year-olds prefer cold drinks 68 per cent to 32 per cent. Over-65s prefer hot 91 per cent to nine per cent. The category is splitting along a generational line you can draw with a ruler.

If your venue is built for hot coffee in 2026, half your future customers don’t drink your product.

Cold is core menu now, or it’s a problem you’ve kicked down the road.

Your customers find you on platforms you don’t use.

Same channel. Different planet.

If you’re a café owner in your forties posting on Facebook, you’re talking to people who already know you. That’s fine for retention but invisible for growth.

Your Gen Z customers are scrolling somewhere you don’t go. They’re the ones setting the next decade of coffee culture in this country.

You don’t have to be on TikTok yourself, but someone on your team needs to be.

Home coffee isn’t competition. It’s opportunity.

65 per cent of Australian households now own a coffee machine. Three in four cups in this country are brewed at home, not bought.

The instinct is to read this as a threat, except the data says the opposite.

Home brewers aren’t replacing café visits. They’re raising the bar on what ‘good coffee’ means. They know what good tastes like because they’ve made it. They notice a bad shot.

Your job isn’t to beat the home machine, instead it’s to be visibly better than the kitchen counter.

The home brewer is the most demanding customer you’ll serve, so treat them like one.

Five customers. Five playbooks.

The same bad shot that loses you a Specialty Enthusiast forever doesn’t even register with a Convenience Regular. The two-minute wait that costs you a Convenience Regular doesn’t bother a Casual Drinker. They came for the table, not the speed.

It’s the same coffee, but there are five different reasons to walk in and five different reasons to walk out.

Trying to serve everyone is serving no one.

Inner-urban, roastery-style? Build for Specialty Enthusiasts. Tasting flights. Single-origin programmes. A barista who can talk extraction. Don’t apologise for the $6.60 price.

Neighbourhood café with wi-fi and longer dwell? Build for Casual Drinkers. Comfort. Recognition. Time.

Suburban with reliable execution? Build for Engaged Mainstream. Loyalty programmes. A small premium. Consistency that beats their last visit.

Transport hub or workplace? Build for Convenience Regulars. Under 90 seconds. Mobile order. Same drink, every time.

Tea-led or cross-format? You might be the café that brings Non-Category over the line. Menus that don’t scare anyone off.

Pick your primary, maybe a secondary, and walk away from the rest. The cafés still standing in five years will be the ones that knew which two.

The cafés that grow from here are the ones that stop pretending otherwise.

Don’t leave your pricing to your customers. Don’t leave it to your accountant. Don’t leave your menu to your suppliers. Don’t leave your marketing to whoever’s loudest in your team chat.

Pick your customer. Then build everything for them.

—

• The full 2026 Cafe and Coffee Insights report is available to Pablo & Rusty’s partners.
• A more detailed report will be shared with the public later in the year.