The days are getting longer and the weather less miserable, that can mean only one thing – summer is nearly here! For many coffee businesses summer means sales drop due to hot drinks being less necessary in the warmer months, but with some clever adjustments to the menu that doesn’t have to be the case. While you won’t necessarily see the big boost that comes along with winter (largely due to higher footfall with Christmas shopping), you can still make sure you provide enough variety to keep your customers coming back over the summer.
Let’s take a look at some of the coffee trends that will be popular this summer.
Iced coffee drinks
Iced coffee has been popular over the warmer season for many years now, and that it’s likely to change any time soon. Many regular coffee drinkers will switch over to the iced variety of their usual drink as soon as the weather gets nicer, so having multiple different options will give you a real advantage. Anyone can make an iced latte, but offering cold milk foams to make summer varieties of things like flat whites and cappuccinos could give you a serious edge over the competition.
The recent boost in popularity of non-dairy milks opens up some great new flavour combinations for summer drinks too. Just imagine how refreshing a delicious coconut iced latte would be on a hot summer afternoon!
Cold brew and nitro
Over the last couple of years cold brew has become a summer staple in all the major coffee shops summer menus, and it’s only likely to become more popular. It’s a simple choice as well as it’s prepared in advance (usually the night before) and doesn’t require any specialist skills to make. It’s a great no-frills summer drink which tends to be popular with the filter coffee drinkers.
A slightly fancier cold brew variety that’s been steadily gaining popularity is nitro coffee. This is essentially cold brew that’s infused with nitrogen and served through a tap similar to draught beer, which gives it a creamier, slightly frothy texture. This has been getting more and more popular over the last few years, with some of the bigger brands such as Starbucks trying it in many of their London stores.
Hot coffee?
Yep, that’s right, hot coffee is still popular even in the summer! Even on the hottest day of the year some people still love their usual flat white or americano and aren’t so easily seduced by the fancy looking cold drinks available. It’s unlikely that cold coffee will ever become more popular that traditional hot coffee in the UK, even in the summer months, so you need to make sure you don’t sacrifice your core, loyal customers for the sake of keeping up with the trends.
To really compete as a coffee business in the summer, you need to have the flexibility to offer both hot and cold drinks with a wide variety of options. That’s why WMF have developed the Dynamic Milk system, which allows you to produce a whole range of different milk foam consistencies, in both hot and cold drinks. This means you can stay covered all year round with a single machine, with no need at all for trained baristas or extra equipment. Dynamic Milk is available for WMF 1500 S, WMF 1500 S+, WMF 5000 S, WMF 5000 S+ and WMF 9000 S+.
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