The Café Dispatch #18
What being relevant culturally means for coffee brands, the café I'm planning to visit in Jodhpur (India) and the combo I won't buy into
Welcome to the Café Dispatch, a weekly letter about interesting café trends across the globe. If you enjoy it, please feel free to share it☕️
Oatly had one of the most talked-about booths at London Coffee Festival this week. A NYC kiosk aesthetic, like it had been lifted straight from a Brooklyn corner and landed in London. I loved what it communicated: we’re so mainstream that the street corner kiosk already has us. We’re everywhere, and we’re not going anywhere. They just rock comms and I love seeing them budgeting for those kind of events and always delivering.
And back in the Netherlands this week, they opened the world’s first ever Bike Thru because of course, if you’re going to launch a coffee experience in Amsterdam, you don’t design it around cars… you design it around the 900,000 bicycles that outnumber people in that city.
Parked at Papaverhoek in Amsterdam Noord, the Oatly Bike Thru is open until June 7, and the concept could not be more perfectly calibrated to its audience. You ride up, you order, you ride away. No parking, no engine running, no awkward U-turn at a window that was never built for you… just a coffee, handed to you at handlebar height, while you get to chat casually with the barista about your ride.
What I love about this isn’t just the playfulness of the design of the house and signpost, both slightly tilted, though the playfulness matters, it’s that they did their cultural research with passion.
They understood that the best brand activations in café culture right now feel native to the city they’re built in (besides the NYC kiosk I guess?), but a bike-thru in Amsterdam is almost an evidence and the fact that nobody did it before is the surprising part (!)
And speaking of Oatly; next Friday, I’ll be featuring an interview with the Brand Creative Lead at Oatly UK. We’ll be diving into how he thinks about cafés from where he sits, and what a brand like Oatly actually looks for in the coffee spaces it works with.
If you follow my Substack, you’ve probably seen me rave lately about Roastery Coffee House and its beautiful cafés across India that I’ve been obsessing over from a distance.
Well, this week the team opened its 14th House in Lodhi Colony’s Meherchand Market in Delhi. In just nine years, Roastery Coffee House has grown to 14 Houses across India and, after speaking with the founder Nishant, it sounds like they’re only getting started.
What first drew me to the brand was how each House pays tribute to the neighbourhood it inhabits, from the Charminar-inspired geometry in Hyderabad to the signature chessboard floors that weave through every location, even Helsinki.
There’s a deep devotion to Indian design, architecture, and culture embedded in these spaces, something I wish far more cafés considered when shaping their interiors.
What I’d order: Their signature and trademarked Cranberry Coffee served in a wine glass, and then whatever single-origin Indian estate coffee they’re featuring on the bar that day, because that’s the whole point.
“Specialty” is becoming the new “organic.” In the same way “organic” lost meaning through overuse, “specialty” is facing the same erosion. Producers and independent roasters are already moving toward more specific, verifiable claims: farm, altitude, harvest date, score. Watch for this shift to reach café menus within 18 months.
The café menu is getting shorter, on purpose. The best-performing cafés, across every market, are simplifying. Fewer drinks, done with absolute precision. The long menus with 30 signature options are (hopefully) disappearing … operators have figured out that a customer who has four extraordinary options will come back. A customer who has 22 adequate ones won’t because feeling overwhelmed is real.
Cafés are becoming snack retail partners, and Starbucks just made it very visible. Khloe Kardashian’s protein popcorn brand Khloud is now being given away across US Starbucks locations bundled with a Grande Tropical Butterfly Refresher. 10,000 combos, launched with a celebrity pop-in at her local store in Los Angeles.
Large coffee chains are turning their counters into snack distribution channels. The café as a point-of-sale for shelf-stable food brands is here… the question for independent cafés is whether this is a playbook worth borrowing or one that dilutes what makes a coffee space special in the first place (and I’d say… don’t follow that playbook - just yet - please!)
If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,
The one thing Alex Kitain noticed in every great coffee country
This is part of the Coffee Founders series where café owners, coffee roasters, and coffee experts share with us their best stories and insights with us.
Why we all need that ONE café
The red wine is definitely helping my creativity, and as everything around us is slowing down, I’ve been longing to write about coffee. It’s an odd thing to say out loud because very few of us want t…
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Wow 18!!
I don't remember when oat milk became a thing but one day it was everywhere. And Oatly seems to be the fav oat milk and one of the more expensive ones($5.50 for 64 oz container here in Austin) and because I'm cheap, I mean economical, iIve try to find less expensive oat milks, and so far I haven't found anything as good. Oatly seems to have a more creamy consistency and better for lattes or flat whites, or whatever they might be when I'm making them at home, which I never used to do before. The less expensive oat milk brands are adequate enough just for brewed coffee. I never was a black coffee drinker and always put milk or half and half in my cup. When I was lactose intolerant, coconut milk or almond milk never made the grade as a half and half replacement. Though the brand "nut pods" was very good, it was also expensive ($5.50 for 25 oz). I've probably said to much