The State of Coffee Part II: What's the Next Espresso Martini?

Edited by Christian Thompson

Hello readers and welcome back to the Inflection Point. For this week’s edition, we will be diving into the second part of our series covering coffee. Last week, we discussed the rise of convenience and quality in the coffee space. This week, we will look at how the alcohol market can take advantage of the trend.

NWO.ai's signal for "Coffee Cocktails" over the past two years.

While cocktails are great on their own, if you want to step it up a notch, coffee may be the addition you need. Coffee cocktails have seen an explosion in popularity, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the past two years, the impact score for “Coffee Cocktails” has increased by 557%. The future estimate predicts substantial growth in the coming months, peaking during the holidays.

We can see from the graph above that coffee-cocktails experience seasonality, with consumer interest peaking in January. However, even with the seasonality, the signal has shown steady growth year-over-year, reaching all-time highs in each of the previous years. After establishing the growth of coffee cocktails, we wanted to see which specific cocktails generated the most consumer buzz.

NWO.ai's comparison table of the signals: "Espresso Martinis," "Carajillo," "Irish Coffee," and "Cold Brew Martinis." The graph to the left is the relative impact score, and the graph to the right is the absolute impact score.

We compiled a list of some of the most popular coffee-based cocktails. The list included Espresso Martinis, Carajillo, Irish Coffee, and Cold Brew Martinis. You have probably heard of most of these cocktails, with the possible exception of Carajillo. Carajillo is a hot coffee cocktail largely popular in Spain and several other Latin American countries. The liquor used varies depending on the region but is most commonly made with brandy, rum, tequila, or a coffee liqueur. Carajillo is interesting because of its relative and absolute score performance compared to the other coffee cocktails.

When looking at the relative impact score comparison above, we see that the impact score for “Espresso Martinis” has increased by 1510% over the past two years. During that same period, the score for “Carajillo” increased by 1064%. While we have all started to see Espresso Martinis everywhere, Carajillo has yet to break through in bars.

According to our platform, this may change. Carajillo also ranked the highest in our comparison of absolute impact scores. This means that consumers are talking about this drink the most out of the coffee cocktails we compared. This could indicate that Carajillo is growing and could be the new must-have coffee cocktail. We have established popular coffee-based drinks, but what is the future of coffee cocktails?

NWO.ai's signals for "Ready To Drink Coffee Cocktail" and "Canned Coffee Cocktail."

A few months ago, we covered the growing trend of canned cocktails and how ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails impact the alcoholic beverage industry. Last week, we discussed how RTD is not exclusive to alcoholic beverages. We saw that consumers value RTD and convenience with non-alcoholic drinks and products. We wanted to see how coffee-based cocktails performed and if the future of these beverages were in RTD and canned cocktails.

Over the past two years, the impact score for “Ready to Drink Coffee Cocktail” increased by 14,204%, and the future estimate forecasts significant growth throughout the rest of the year. During the same period, the impact score for “Canned Coffee Cocktail” increased by 439%. We have seen companies begin experimenting in this space. For example, Kahlua, the famous coffee liqueur brand, is releasing a canned Espresso Martini. We believe that companies will continue to iterate various coffee-based cocktail products in a ready-to-drink can as consumers shift to the more convenient option.

Thank you for tuning into this week’s Inflection Point. We hope you enjoyed and learned more about the caffeinated beverage that the world seems to run on. Check in next week for more great content, and maybe try a coffee cocktail the next time you are at a bar.

Cheers!

About NWO.ai
NWO.ai's predictive platform enables leading Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to anticipate and track global cultural shifts by aggregating, analyzing, and producing actionable reports on human-generated data. We are leveraging petabytes of external, noisy, and unstructured data from various sources –including search, social media, blogs, news, patent databases, and SEC filings and we are continuously adding more sources. Our mission is to answer the what, when, and most importantly, 'why' behind a consumer trend and enable our customers to detect these shifts as early as possible.

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