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Good morning from Milan! 🇮🇹 And happy month of September. I’m spending a few days where espressos are a religion, not all espressos are good but yet things are looking up. I’ve discovered a few new incredible specialty coffee places! It wasn’t like that when I visited 2 years ago… so things can change for the best!

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: the new thing cafés do to attract regulars, the new café model I see popping up and café news you might find.. shocking!

We’re finally in an environment where cafés in big cities get a lot of traction and attention. There’s now a myriad of apps (Coffee Trip, Comyu) that you can download which only feature specialty coffee shops, and many people research cafés before landing in a new city to make sure they’ll get their dose of good coffee.

If you’re in a smaller town, it might be even easier for you to not only get new clients, but also retain your customers because you’re literally their only option. But if you’re in a city like Paris, or Shanghai or Buenos Aires, building a base of loyal customers is hard.

So what do we do?

I was shocked to see The Coffee leave one of their locations in the 10th in Paris earlier this summer. The space was odd, granted, but it was easy to get to. Anyhow, they dropped it. And along came a new café called Another.

From day 1, they launched a running club program. Their entire content on instagram was about their running clubs meeting up and refuelling on coffee and good food. That’s when I realised that this was an actual strategy.

It’s now happening all over.

Here is what that looks like in the wild:

• Another, Paris 10th: running club from day one; all Instagram content built around post-run refuel at the café.

• Kiin Paris Run Club meets at Le Peloton Café, Paris 4th: cycling culture café anchoring a run community Wednesdays & Sundays.

• Circle Running Club at Circle Shop, Paris 10th: 50-minute social runs every Tuesday.

• Austin Coffee Run Club at Batch ATX: 3 miles every Wednesday, all paces welcome.

• Saucony café residencies globally: from Ludlow Coffee Supply in NYC to London and Boston, blending running culture with track-inspired café atmosphere.

• Chess Club Coffee, Chicago: chess sets, daytime book club and crafting clubs.

• Nook, Brooklyn: Monday knitting & crochet circle; Tuesday chess club.

• Café con Libros, Brooklyn: feminist book club running since 2018.

• In Wyoming, horse-friendly drive-thru coffee spots where riders literally pull up on horseback.

They’re ultimately the perfect setting for any community to gather and for customers to become regulars through finding their communities. And it’s a very smart way for cafés to develop stronger and better relationships with many people at once.

These clubs ultimately create a reason to return stronger than good coffee or great pastries.

Which club have you joined that uses a café as their location?

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Check out the Coffee Dispatch Job Board

The Coffee Dispatch Job Board features all of the best specialty coffee roles in Europe in one place, updated daily. Right now there are roles from places like Copenhagen Coffee Lab, LAP, La Marzocco and more.

If you work for a brand that is hiring within specialty coffee, this job board is for you too. Post your job listings to get in front of talented people dreaming to enter our beloved specialty coffee industry.

% Arabica is a Kyoto born coffee company. One that is recognisable on a global scale nowadays and I’d argue does decent coffee… Not my favourite, yet they’re huge.

Their branding is super recognisable, and their founder has expanded the brand at a pace most companies would never risk. Kenneth Shoji opened the first store in Hong Kong in 2013, put the global flagship in Kyoto a year later, and now runs a business built almost entirely on franchising it out to local operators rather than owning every door himself.

Over 240 stores across roughly 20 countries later, the pitch has stayed the same: each café sits somewhere “iconic,” designed with a different architect every time, so visiting one feels less like grabbing a coffee and more like a stop on a pilgrimage.

As I was scrolling through Instagram to repost interesting things happening in our café space, I saw their new Kuwait drivethru opening and had to dig deeper.

The market there is run by Nejoud, and instead of replicating the destination flagship formula, they’ve built out a fleet of drivethrus in Third Ring Road, Downtown, Adailiya, Jabriya, and more. It makes a lot of sense once you factor in the climate: half the year, nobody’s walking up for a coffee in Kuwait heat.

Ken Shoji has been disciplined about letting local operators build the playbook their market actually needs, instead of exporting one template everywhere and hoping it holds.

It’s a good reminder that when you start scaling your coffee brand around the world, it might be better to let someone else run the playbook.

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• Stumptown Returns to LA Core with Historic Theatre Flagship
  The Portland-born roaster opens its new café and regional training space in Lincoln Heights' Starland Theatre on August 29, marking its first LA city-proper presence since exiting the Arts District in 2024. It's a bet on experiential retail at a time when indies need a reason to compete. As their director of retail said: “They (coffee shops) should reflect the character of the neighborhoods they serve.”

• Starbucks Strikes In-Flight Coffee Deal with China Eastern Airlines
  China's second-largest airline will serve Starbucks coffee onboard via Nestlé's existing partnership with the carrier. It's a high-altitude brand impression play at a moment when Starbucks is losing ground to Luckin on the ground in China.

• Beijing Robot Barista Sets World Record at 202 Cups Per Hour
  A fully automated, human-free robotic coffee shop in Beijing smashed the hourly record. The $2.18 billion robotic barista market is projected to hit $4.05 billion by 2030. We’re headed in that direction in big metropolis where speed is everything.

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First things first, I need to apologise for the delay - this was meant to come out a week after the first part which I published on August 16th. Yet, here we are!

I had planned to publish an interview because as you may have noticed I was a bit behind on interviews too… Substack brought me some exciting consulting opportunities alongside Roastery Coffee House. Your girl got to eat and pay rent, so I had to prioritise working on those projects first…

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about India ever since I left. But before that, let’s talk about what I promised in part 1:

• The three layers I found in the Indian coffee shop ecosystem: Copy, Gravity, and Mirror (and how these are a lot more granular)

• What a Greek chain entering India can teach us

• Why the most interesting new brand I found, NAKED, did not start with a café

Ever since selling the Blend - ages ago now - I’ve been hunting down the perfect café selling the perfect flat white. Unfortunately European cafés back in 2015 were not that knowledgeable about specialty coffee nor flat white drinks.

As I developed a sense on finding places that would, I also developed a keen interest in understanding how these brilliant coffee brands think about their location, their scaling strategy, their hiring program and developing the right menu… you get the picture.

But when I started writing The Coffee Dispatch full-time last September, and with that, having the chance to interview some incredible people in the space, I got curious about the impact a café has on their local neighbourhood - and vice versa, how culture impacted its coffee shops.

Now with technology and crazy access to the once upon a time “hidden gems,” things have changed dramatically. In other words, most cafés you love can now be found across all major cities in Europe. Hence, I was ecstatic about visiting different cafés in India; it was the land I hoped would bring me new insights. And it did.

Here’s what I discovered:

Each city has cafés that belong to a “layer” and these are technically three different answers to the same question:

What is a café actually selling, when what it’s selling isn’t just a drink?

I break down the five positioning models I found, the psychology behind why customers return to each one, and the biggest mistake founders make when they think they're only selling coffee.

It’s clear what we’re seeing in Europe: coffee is no longer the reason someone visits a café. It’s the bait - unless you’re obsessed with coffee, but few are in the way that they’ll remain forever loyal to a place because their coffee is delicious.

You can see that with the evolution of loyalty cards disappearing in a lot of cities, and loyalty programs making no sense… such as Costa’s a global brand yet with local programs and often regulations as to where they apply. But that’s a topic for another time.

Back to India, I first mentioned 3 layers, but after spending time flicking through all of my café pictures on my phone, there are 3 layers with players in each quadrant where one sells one specific feeling.

And they’re all giving their customers a clear reason to come back.

Because the answer to the question above, what is a café actually selling, when what it’s selling isn’t just a drink?

is this:

They’re selling you a specific version of YOU (or you could be in that space).

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It’s a foggy morning in Ericeira and though I’m trying to bring myself to write this newsletter in the very surf-like co-working space I signed up for a few weeks ago, I just can’t.

Instead I’m now seating on my couch with a coffee in hand and wondering how the heck are we already the 25th of August (!?) Summer has a way of slowing down things all while accelerating us through the year. It’s odd and yet, I’m excited about fall and traveling to Milano next.

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: how to do shelving right, a café in Rome that doesn’t care about social media and the café news you shouldn’t miss (!)

Shelving, shelving, shelving…

So many cafés today think about shelving the wrong way.

Last week I shared in my notes a few different setups from different cafés I recently visited in Paris;

• Nuances

• Bacha

• Forêt Forêt

And I asked you which one you preferred and why, but I also asked what you’d like to see and buy from a café you enjoyed.

The surprising part, yet obvious, is this :
Most of us don’t want to feel like we’re in a store when we walk into a café.

Instead we want the experience to be curated.

And to me, that is very much how people who write newsletters or have media should think about ads. It isn’t about loading up the space so you can maximise your revenue. It’s about thinking how people move in your space. How they would naturally gravitate towards your shelves. And why.

What is there that could potentially be a nice souvenir? Or an interesting coffee to take home?

Too often I see cafés not showing and selling the coffee you drink in their cups. And so how would someone then pick a different coffee? If I loved my coffee that morning, I want to make sure I can bring back a bag.

Coffee is an experience and a moment you share with others.

And for the ones that excel at shelf space, they understand the following:

• They understand how people move in their cafés. Where do they stop. How do they shop. What questions do they ask. Why would they get a specific tool instead of another. And the level of education brought to attention so they can enjoy their purchase once at home.

• They understand what their values are. And hence, how they show these through what they sell. If you are about community, then sell 1KG coffee bags (if viable financially). Or sell large cookies like Double Black. Or maybe the cookie dough so people can go home and share that experience with their friends and families.

• They understand the design and feeling a shelf gives you. Is it airy and well curated? Is it stacked enough so one understands they can purchase it? Or does it feel empty and sad, and no one gets it. Do people ask about it ever?

Ultimately shelving shouldn’t reflect your inventory but rather the continuation of the conversation you started over the counter. It’s an opportunity for you, as a café owner and for your guest walking in, to carry on telling your story through the objects you share with them.

It goes without saying that the better looking, better curated and smarter placed shelf can do wonders for your brand if you take the time to think about it intentionally.

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Check out the Coffee Dispatch Job Board

The Coffee Dispatch Job Board features all of the best specialty coffee roles in Europe in one place, updated daily. Right now there are roles from places like Copenhagen Coffee Lab, LAP, La Marzocco and more.

If you work for a brand that is hiring within specialty coffee, this job board is for you too. Post your job listings to get in front of talented people dreaming to enter our beloved specialty coffee industry.

I’m an avid reader of the brilliant newsletter For Starters and a few weeks ago they featured Run by Nuns which I fell in love with,

1. Through the interview, Caitlin Zaino’s philosophy toward specialty coffee and hospitality

2. Their website. It’s thoughtfully designed. It invites you into a world unlike any other, and mostly, it tells their story in a way I’ve never seen before.

3. Their interior design. After having a peek on Instagram and seeing the beautiful pictures on the website, the thread of thoughtfulness is there - through the materials they chose, the way the espresso bar is designed. You can feel it and touch it with your eyes.

I loved when Caitlin said:

“I’ve paid attention to zero algorithms. And yet we’ve grown week over week, all from word of mouth. Tourists will tell their friends back home and then the friends will come and say, “My friend who was in Rome said I have to come.” We’ve had a lot of expats I didn’t count on.”

I think too many cafés today count on making money through social media, and design their strategies around likes and virality. Some have excelled at it - Nitro Bar on TikTok comes to mind.

But most cafés start from a simpler wish: to fill the gap. The one where you experienced amazing coffee abroad, couldn’t find it back home, and opened a place hoping people would come.

Caitlin didn’t optimise for algorithms, and she didn’t optimise for shelf space either. She built something so specific that people scaled it for her and that’s the playbook more cafés should turn to when they’re opening a café out of passion.

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• Streamer Coffee Company opens first US shop in Milwaukee, founded by Hiroshi Sawada (the first Asian winner of the World Latte Art Championship), announced its first permanent US location in Milwaukee. The brand, known for reviving neglected buildings across its 19 Japanese locations, is crossing the Pacific with its signature latte art and design-forward spaces. Founder-led specialty concepts with strong visual DNA are now exporting from Asia to the West.

• Third Wave Coffee raises $43 million for Indian expansion Bangalore-based specialty chain raised $43 million. The capital will fuel domestic store expansion as the Indian specialty coffee market continues to scale rapidly, competing with Starbucks, Tim Hortons, and a growing field of domestic challengers. Local capital is no longer waiting for Western brands to validate a market, domestic operators are now the ones setting the expansion pace.

• Komeda's Coffee debuts in Bangkok, a nearly 1,000-store Japanese "kissaten" chain famous for its breakfast sets and retro café culture, announced its first Southeast Asian location in Bangkok. The chain is targeting 180 stores across the region as part of a major ASEAN expansion push. Southeast Asia is becoming the new battleground where Asian café formats, not American or European, are defining what everyday coffee culture looks like.

If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,

Thank you for being here. If you love reading The Coffee Dispatch and want to support the newsletter, the easiest ways are to like this post, leave a comment, share it with a friend, or upgrade to a paid subscription.

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Good morning & afternoon!

This week’s Dispatch is coming from Paris where I’ve been packing boxes (mostly fueling my husband with good coffee so he could pack more boxes) and well, bidding farewell to my favourite city in the world.

As for one, maintaining a flat is too expensive for me right now (yes I do have a few clients but I’m SO far from doing the money I made when working in tech) and two, some of the opportunities that came my way this quarter are requiring more travels which I’m prioritising. More coming soon!

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: the new metric I think cafés should think about more often, a crazy futuristic place who got the assignment right and the café news of the week.

The hardest thing I found for cafés to excel at is continuity.

For a long time, I would have argued consistency was the most challenging part but after a long weekend in Paris visiting Forêt Forêt, Maru Coffee, and Cédric et la Chocolaterie, I changed my mind.

What I loved most is that the entire spaces reflected the brand’s passion from one corner to the next.

Forest environment. Small town squares indoors. Chocolate from the ceiling to the walls, to the counter. An entire world made of the idea of conveying one single passion.

Whereas consistency is repeating the same thing correctly. Continuity is making sure every thing points to the same idea.

• Consistency is “We always use ceramic cups.”

• Continuity is “We chose these ceramic cups because they feel like the handmade pottery your grandmother had, and that warmth is exactly why you came here.”

• Consistency is training your barista to say hello.

• Continuity is hiring people who would actually hang out here because their passion matches yours.

Continuity is less of a design choice and more of a decision tree (if you’ve ever learned about thinking in decision trees.. then you’ll laugh - maybe? 😃)

If your café is about the forest, the plants cannot be the only thing that whispers it. The menu could be digital to save trees, or in a paper that is recycled. The playlist should sound like the perfect songs to accompany your hike or picnic. Your loyalty card should be seed paper a customer can plant. And yes, maybe 3% of revenue goes to reforestation because the idea and mission is BIGGER than your café.

If your café is about community, the seating is not “cozy.” It’s deliberately arranged so a solo laptop worker and a four-person meeting can feel like they belong to the same room. The walls don’t display generic art. They display business cards or drawings made by neighbours. The events aren’t only “latte art classes.” They’re “meet the baker who supplies your croissant” because community is the entire point - the network you actually build.

If your café is about chocolate, the bathroom should smell like cacao butter because that’s the scent of your hand cream. The mirror frame should look like a broken chocolate bar. The soap should be dark and rich. Continuity means the bathroom is the final scene and impression reflecting what you designed in its entirety.

Overall, continuity is the key metric that makes a customer feel like they’ve entered a world. A brand new world that you’ve designed as a café owner.

Consistency used to be the reason people came back but in a city as dense as Paris with cafés that keep popping up, continuity is how you foster devoted loyalty.

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Mars CNX in Chiang Mai is something else. The ambition to show you what having a coffee or cocktail on Mars is a pretty awesome one. It’s taken me by surprise as I was looking to book a trip to Thailand and visit Bangkok, but there I saw this café!

And it just reinforced my thinking about continuity over consistency.

What I’d order: Their signature coffee drink, Black Hole or their Mars coffee, a dirty coffee with premium milk (?) curious as to what Premium Milk tastes like.

What I want to figure out: Whether we’ll see more of these incredible spaces in Europe. Forêt Forêt did a master job at it, but I’d like to see how far those concepts could go in place where we’re a little shyer.

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• Goodboybob just went bi-coastal. The California-based roaster opened its first East Coast café in Hudson, New York, and a new Los Angeles location, roughly doubling its retail footprint in about two weeks. If you run a coffee roasting brand, the message is unmissable: physical retail is still the primary growth engine, not DTC alone.

• Kalve Coffee’s international expansion is a textbook revenue-profit gap. The Estonian specialty roaster’s revenues are soaring on the back of global growth, but profits haven’t caught up. For café operators eyeing new markets, it’s a reminder that scaling across borders is still a cash-burn game, not a margin story.

• East Asia is about to become the first region to surpass 200,000 branded coffee shops. According to World Coffee Portal's Project Café East Asia 2026, the region grew 18.4% to reach 180,268 stores, with China alone adding over 20,000 outlets in a single year. Nearly doubling the US market in size!

Thank you for being here. If you love reading The Coffee Dispatch and want to support the newsletter, the easiest ways are to like this post, leave a comment, share it with a friend, or upgrade to a paid subscription.

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I keep a Google Map of cafés I have never visited. For months, India was just a cluster of red pins I kept zooming into.

I do not remember how I first landed on Roastery Coffee House, probably one of those 2 AM Instagram spirals where you start with a tile floor and end up with a list of every brand you would like to work with one day. But I remember the exact moment I thought: I need to see this in real life.

It was the chessboard floors. They showed up in every photo, from Hyderabad to Lucknow, and then the stepwells design of the Jaipur café…. I wanted to know if the real thing felt as intentional as the feed made it look.

The wish worked faster than I expected. I was consulting for Perfect Daily Grind when Roastery reached out. A few calls with Nishant, and it was one of those conversations where you both say the same thing at the same time and then laugh too hard. A few months later, I was on a plane to New Delhi.

One thing before we go further; Roastery Coffee House is now a client, and visiting them over July bought me access I would not otherwise have had. I got to ask the questions you cannot usually ask a founder, and to sit in rooms during service rather than after it.

I landed on July 19th and stayed for nine days to visit four cities: New Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, (still my favourite city in India to date).

I spent the three weeks after that scribbling 🫣 and working.

In a world where travelling between cities feels like a late-night scroll through Instagram, where city guides read like yet another fancy restaurant menu, surprises have become a luxury that well-travelled people no longer expect. Cafés populate most streets now, in big cities and smaller towns alike, all looking similarly minimalistic with a peculiar attention to the quality of coffee over comfort, or in fact anything else.

So I landed ready for colour and chaos, and I was not ready for how many cafés looked like they had been airlifted out of Europe.

Here is what I mean. In most Indian cities I visited there is a particular kind of new café: concrete walls, naked bulbs, single origin espresso, and a playlist that could be playing in London right now. They’re beautiful and they’re also interchangeable. After a few days I started to wonder whether social media had become the world’s most boring architect, and that it had managed it even in India, a country where colours, maximalism and strong patterns are already on point.

And then I walked into a Roastery house, over and again, and the floor would tilt. The Charminar geometry in Hyderabad, the 1920s mansion in Lucknow with tall ceilings and lots of greenery around.

These are cafés built from scratch by the team, and they are simply magical, the kind of place many of us are actually looking for when we go hunting for somewhere to read, work, or eat. They insisted that the neighbourhood had a history, and that the café had chosen to respect it rather than erase it to fit the current mould of what a trendy café should look like.

That is the gap between what I expected and what I found. Blue Tokai is running around 240 cafés and openly aiming at 800 by 2030. Third Wave crossed 200 stores in December. Subko turned a Byculla warehouse into a pilgrimage. The infrastructure for great specialty coffee is there, people know they can get it and they do want it, and while they still drink less of it than we do in Europe or the US, the culture around cafés is solidifying.

So the question is not whether India can do specialty coffee. It is what happens after. Whether a country with this much colour, history and craft decides its cafés should look like everyone else’s, or like their own.

Below are four signals I noticed over and over. None of them are cultural curiosities. They’re all, I’d argue, operating decisions, and all four have a European version that almost nobody is making their own.

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It’s 5:30 AM on this Tuesday morning and officially Day 1 of working full-time on The Coffee Dispatch and for my clients in my favourite industry (☕️ & 🫂). Without further ado, here’s this week’s Dispatch.

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: why the cafés that survive solve for belonging, what LAP Coffee gets right (and what it might be getting wrong), and the three coffee stories I’m watching right now.

Every week someone asks me the same question: how do all these cafés survive?

They’re half-empty at 9am, full of laptop people by noon and nowadays competing with chains that are heavily VC-backed (hi Blank Street Coffee, LAP Coffee and Luckin), rising rents, and increasingly expensive coffee.

After travelling across Europe and Asia this year and interviewing dozens of café founders, I’d like to think that all kinds of cafés are needed since so many of us around the world have made it their daily ritual to visit a café.

Hence I firmly believe the two following statements are true:

1. The cafés that survive are not necessarily the ones with the best coffee.

2. They’re the ones that make people feel they belong.

Yes, there is a huge amount of discourse about third places right now. On Substack, Instagram, and in publications like Perfect Daily Grind. We’re ultimately all trying to understand why these spaces still matter so much in 2026.

Cafés have become workplaces, meeting rooms, dating venues, neighbourhood living rooms, travel destinations, and sometimes the entire reason we visit a city (👋🏼 hi!)

But the founders I keep meeting aren’t obsessed with becoming the biggest café in town, nope. They’re obsessed with becoming someone’s favourite café.

And that is a very different kind of business model.

1- The café is replacing what we lost

Paul and Didier at Fève in Paris told me something that has become the spine of this whole issue.

“The coffee shop is replacing what we have known like the schools twenty or thirty years ago, even more in the countryside fifty years ago. It is taking the place of small neighbourhood shops and bringing back a social link.”

In Paris, the old chimney-wood sellers at the bottom of apartment buildings were where people gathered.. and as those places disappeared slowly, cafés returned.

That quote changed the way I think about third places and I think completely reframes how we think about cafés popping up daily in our neighbourhoods. Because the question isn’t whether cafés are important, it is which businesses they are replacing.

2- The regulars are the algorithm

Alex Castellani at Subtext in Toronto deleted his personal Instagram six years ago.

“Why am I concerned with how many views a post gets when I have hundreds of people coming through the café every single day that I can have face-to-face engagement with?”

Again and again, I heard versions of the same story.

Elijah Knapp at Elliott Coffee in Connecticut told me that many of his crowdfunding investors were regulars first.

Panos Koumouros at Amber & Joe in Cyprus spent his first six months walking around his neighbourhood offering free coffee to strangers, hoping they would come back not just for the coffee, but for the hospitality.

Let’s stop thinking that attracting new customers all the time is how we do better. Let’s rather think about how do we ensure that those who loved us in the first place keep coming back.

3- Hospitality is the real product

Ollie Simon at Oatly UK said the hardest thing to teach is not extraction theory but a barista to stop judging the order.

“If someone wants a large latte with three sugars, make the best fucking large latte with three sugars they’ve ever had.”

He learned this at Coffee Supreme in New Zealand: invite everybody into the party you’re creating, not just the hyper-coffee people.

And that idea kept appearing in different forms throughout my interviews.

Christina and Kelly at Double Black call hospitality “number zero”. The prerequisite before the coffee, the design, or the branding.

Olga Melik-Karakozova at WAGMI put it even more simply:

“At the end of the day, the hospitality is what keeps us coming back.”

Hospitality is emotional labour. And it’s a lot harder than throwing new activations, or posting on social media daily or coming up with new menu items. It’s about understanding who loves your café, why and what exactly so that they keep coming back.

And the founders who understand that are usually the ones building something much more durable than a coffee business.

4- Small is a strategy

Paul at Fève said their company “remains quite small and human.”

Olga told me she has no interest in opening another café:

“The point is to be here.”

Camilla Svanberg at Hakone in Oslo opened four cafés in one year and still carries cups between locations in IKEA bags, while hiring more people and understanding that if her team isn’t happy, success won’t be permanent.

Elijah Knapp said he never wants a team that can’t fit around one table.

For all the talk of scale, optimisation, and expansion, many of the founders I admire are protecting something much simpler.

They’re protecting human scale internally and externally.

5 - The laptop people are not the problem

We’ve turned the laptop people into a symbol of everything we think is wrong with café culture…

People occupying tables for hours, buying one coffee only, and treating cafés like offices. But the truth is that most of us are the laptop people now and the real question is not whether people work in cafés, it is whether a café still creates social connection despite that.

A third place is not defined by the absence of laptops but by the presence of belonging.

The ones where the barista knows your name, the space feels like it has its own story, and the business exists because the community needed it. But how do you find a place like that nowadays and how do you not fall into the trap of owning a café because it will give you independence?

This is often where tension arises and founders decide to scale to get more freedom and more money, but those who got into the business for their love of coffee and people struggle with that notion. They’re also the spaces we seek when we want good coffee, and real atmosphere.

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The above reflection led me to LAP Coffee.

I first came across LifeAmongPeople while flipping through Monocle earlier this year, after they were named one of the 25 best coffee shops in the world and it made me question the entire industry once again… because the more I looked into them, the more they felt like the opposite of everything the founders above had described.

In less than two years, LAP has opened roughly 15 locations across Germany’s biggest cities, and they’ve done it with a completely different operating model from the founders I’ve interviewed throughout this year.

Their cafés are heavily automated through Eversys and Übermilk machines, many of the locations are tiny, designed for speed rather than lingering, and deliberately stripped of the things that have traditionally defined café culture, whether that is the conversation with the barista, the possibility of staying for an hour, or simply the feeling that the space exists for something beyond the transaction itself…..

The more I looked at that coffee business, the more it seemed like the coffee was becoming an entry point into a much larger lifestyle ecosystem that includes collaborations with Highsnobiety, Bumble, Lululemon, Puma x Solebox, Uniqlo, and adidas, alongside yoga classes, running clubs, chemistry cafés, and merchandise that people are apparently willing to resell for hundreds of euros.

In many ways, they’ve followed what the most successful fashion, fitness, and wellness brands have been doing for years. Using a physical retail space as the entry point - the first touchpoint - for any new customer to buy into their world.

And the reason I’m bringing this up is that comparing this to the founders I’ve interviewed this year, LAP is solving a completely different problem for a different kind of customer who really cares about

1. Convenience,

2. Consistency,

3. Accessibility,

4. And brand recognition.

I don’t think one of these models will replace the other, because I don’t think they are competing for exactly the same thing.

One is trying to become part of your daily routine and your neighbourhood, while the other is trying to become part of your identity, and the more I travel, the more I find myself wondering which of those two things we are actually looking for when we walk into a café.

Question will remain unanswered for a while I guess…

What I’d order: The single-origin espresso (beans rated above 80 SCA points) and I’d probably try the protein latte just to understand what audience they’re actually building.

What I want to figure out: Whether this is the future of European café culture (I hope NOT) or another venture-capital interlude that disappears when the funding dries up.

If you’ve visited LAP, tell me: is it as transactional as it looks, or is there something I’m missing?

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• Starbucks Korea is in serious trouble. The backlash over its “Tank Day” campaign shows that cafés don’t operate in a cultural vacuum. What you name a tumbler can become a national crisis, and cultural literacy has become operational risk.

• Dutch Bros is going real estate shopping. The Oregon-based chain is pursuing dozens of recently closed Salad and Go sites. This is less about coffee and more about owning drive-thru infrastructure.

• Saddle Café is expanding again. The UAE-based specialty chain is entering its fourth international market, while Café Amazon has finally launched in Bangladesh after a nearly two-year delay. The most aggressive café expansion stories are coming from the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,

If you’re building a café, or simply obsessed with why some become institutions and others don’t, I think you’ll enjoy the interviews above.

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A few months before our call, Kelly McGee and Cristina Ashbaugh were smashing out the facade of an abandoned pharmacy with a hammer, in full view of the street, with nothing screening them from passers-by.

People kept stopping to ask what was coming.

“Some people were like, oh thank god, the building has been vacant for too long! I was like, okay. Right. So yeah, I don’t want to screw this up.”

I love that answer. It’s the least romantic version of market validation I’ve ever heard and also the most honest. No focus group, no survey, just strangers on a San Francisco pavement telling two people with a hammer that the neighbourhood was ready.

Now, before we go any further, something you need to know, because it changes how you should read the rest of this:

Kelly and Cristina did not open a café the way most of you will open a café.

They already had a profitable business YARDSALE and thus, an audience paying attention. They also hired an experienced general manager a month before opening, and if their café lost money in year one, that was totally OK.

Very few of you reading this post has that.

So I’m not going to hand you their playbook and pretend it’s transferable in full.

What I want to do is separate the two piles: the decisions they could only make because of the safety net, and the decisions that cost nothing and would work just as well if you were funding this on a personal loan and stubbornness.

How a ski pole company ended up with an espresso machine

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This week is my LAST week consulting for Perfect Daily Grind. I took this opportunity earlier this year when I was given the chance to join the team and help them with their sales and go to market strategy and it’s been honestly the best and most strategic choice I have made a in a long time.

Before that, I used to pick jobs that were handed to me by people who believed I had enormous potential and could do incredible and yet, though I may have done fairly well, my heart was rarely in it. I always had mini side-hustles to stay excited about work life but I rarely fully committed to it.

Working with the biggest media in the coffee industry taught me a lot but mostly it offered me conviction, and confirmed that I pivoted to an industry I loved where people saw my true colours and my passion which led to so many more exciting opportunities in just the past 2 months.

It comes a time where you need to jump ships and trust yourself a little more than you would. Where the opportunities coming your way are too good to pass because they tick all the boxes. So here I am - feeling extremely grateful for understanding how the largest media in the world functions while contributing to their success, and now flying out to build my own media dream and journey.

If you’re a coffee company or a café, and are curious to hear more about how we could work together, or know someone who I should absolutely meet to chat about coffee and cafés, please don’t be shy and DM me ☕️

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: how expectations changed our relationships with cafés, a french café in Buenos Aires and why we all love Cold Brew

Very few of us speak about expectations when it comes to our relationships with cafés, mostly because (IMO) there are never really positive. At the same time, I also think that this is how the industry keeps improving.

Understanding what your customers expect from your café is a great way to keep doing better and coming up with great ideas. It might be my years in the tech industry trying to figure out how to design surveys that bring in great feedback but I’m convinced that this applies to cafés too - and medias!

One way to see whether feedback is really important to a place is by observing whether waiters - baristas or chefs walk to your table within the first 5 minutes of you digging into your drink & food. And I’ve found that this is still a very RARE occurence across all kind of establishments. If it were more common, cafés would have the chance to fix anything gone wrong, potentially upsell or cross-sell (always with kindness and with a mindset of adding value to their experience).

India, surprisingly, showed me that this was a part of their ways of working. It’s most likely because they have an insane amount of staff in each location due to how big their workforce is in general, but still… if they couldn’t, some of the locations, such as Conçu in Hyderabad, brought me the bill with this very cute form.

Those are tiny, incremental changes that often make a big difference. Also it shows that you truly care about anyone walking in the door.

On a fun note, here are my expectations when I walk into a new place.

• Being greeted when walking in

• Friendly staff

• Being told about the coffee and food in detail

• Being served fairly rapidly

• Being check on when having my first bite or sip

• Good music playing

• Decent seating depending on the kind of place I visit

And then, I have an array of more specific expectations… but I won’t go on about it over here because gosh, I’ll just scare you.

But I want to know yours!

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As I am planning my next few trips abroad, hopefully to go meet more café owners who are looking to work on their positioning - branding in order to scale their brand globally, I came across Moshu Treehouse.

The facade was completely revamped on this gorgeous yet ruined french influenced building. And as you can see they designed the bar inside while keeping some of that luxurious feel beautiful mansions used to have. They’re also serving specialty coffee from Colombia which looks to be approved by a lot of coffee nerds.

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• Gen Z Experiential Retail: How Coach and Ralph Lauren Use In-Store Cafés to Win Younger Shoppers - an interesting way to present this surge of cafés inside fashion stores though I do think that this is only the start. As brands pop up and want to create worlds, anyone could identify with, we’ll see more and more activations and cafés across retail stores.

• Dunkin’ coffee buckets are coming back with new car cup holder - no comments though this really signals how fast food chains are innovating in coffee to charge more and attract a bigger market share.

• ‘Cold Brew’ Is Now in the Dictionary. What Does That Say About Contemporary Coffee Culture? - interesting piece about how words are going into dictionaries but also, how cold brew came to be. It’s a little (WAY) older than what we think!

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I am writing this letter from the most wonderful city in India, Hyderabad - very subjectively said, but its luscious streets, greenery everywhere and its number of fantastic cafés serving Indian Specialty Coffee has made me a fan. Now that I am about to leave this country, I’ll be forever grateful for one of the most incredible weeks of my life. More details to come soon.

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: three tips on copying business models successfully, observations from India and the weekly news rundown

My head is spinning from all the things I’d love to say and write about but after spending one of the most intense, and bestest week of my life abroad, I had to pause to remember that coffee is continuously evolving. Whether we speak about the landscape in developing countries like India or in developed countries like the western world, us, humans are having the same conversation about our passion for coffee.

Why do we keep seeing the same cafés in Delhi than the ones we see in London, and why do we have to copy existing models? Why are we not questioning our passion more often and why are we not taking more risks?

Those are loaded questions with sensible answers, yet I do miss the excitement of finding the kind of spaces which no other cities would offer but the one you’re in right here, right now.

In a world where social media gets you footfall and fame for a while, it is easy to go down the path of the well-known, already loved design. It is easy to review what is sensational and try our best to do the same hoping the audience will be in awe with what we’ve got to offer. Yet, each model has its own playbook. But also, its own values and thus, chance for continued successes.

A simple example, Third Wave or Blue Tokai in India. Both reminded me very much of Starbucks and well, Blue Bottle. Compact spaces, good design and easy menu to go with irrespective of where I am in the world. Yet (!) so very far from what I expected.

Here are three things which I feel strongly about when it comes to those chains;

1. Know your Customer. Don’t shape an audience, yes you can predict but still… Make time to understand them extremely well, especially when education is a core part of your success.

2. Design your Menu mindfully. If what you offer is a poor copy of what exists abroad but your ingredients are impossibly hard to source or recreate due to local produces but also people’s skill, don’t. Reduce your menu and ensure you get regular feedback on it.

   

3. Copy the Design but remember Values should be yours, and operationalised around your goals. It’s easy to make a lookalike but everything else should be about your vision, mission and ultimately, your people.

Of course there are many more learnings and observations I feel should go into that list, but let’s stick to this and remember that those chains have made us enjoy coffee in airports (which is a huge plus!). It isn’t lost on me that copying successful models is part of the game, but though scale is important, what’s even more important is the quality, consistency and cohesiveness among all - visitors and operators. When that finds alignment, everything else works.

And an example representing just that is Naad Coffee. A coffee & roasterys space in a large 1-level area where all the seating is in the centre (quite unusual I found for Indian) and thus making it look busy at all time, but also where homemade bread is confectioned, syrups made in-house, coffee is roasted and where the plates look originally theirs. The menu was a breath of fresh air, respecting Indian palates but exploring ideas to further their offering.

What other cafés would you add to the list of copycats in dire need to find their own voice?

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Earlier this year, I made a tiny bucket list. I listed all the events and places I wanted to visit to hunt down incredible cafés. One of them was India (box ✅) and another one is Melbourne. Wild dreams of speaking at MICE are very alive and thus, my Google Map is just growing as I write this.

Enough said - Airflow Coffee is one of them. Just opening their Instagram page felt like a warm hug. They are small but their facade and window opening is adorable. It’s inviting besides being different and eye catching.

In today’s world where we are being teased with hooks, an entrance is just that. The hook that’ll make you walk in (or not).

If you have visited Airflow, would you recommend it?

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• Indian Coffee is having a moment. Just this week, a rather lengthy article was published about South India filter coffee which I had earlier this week - and I loved it!

• Blue Bottle has opened a new location in Shibuya, Tokyo. Looking at these pictures, it made me realise cold spaces might be what many are going for… yet it defeats the entire purpose of what having a coffee really means (at least to me).

• Luckin has finally opened in the US. I am excited to see how this will pan out since coffee and our taste is changing, and young people will be there trying new drinks. This is a smart move from them on a PR level to write about what people should order when walking in. Well done and well, let’s see where they’ll be in 3 months from now.

If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,

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I’m writing this letter from New Delhi, where I’ve spent the last 24 hours doing what I love most: café-hopping through the spots that make headlines here and, in some cases, abroad too (Blue Tokai, looking at you). And in barely a day, I’ve already learned more than I expected.

Most of it came from talking to people. Customers lingering over their coffee were happy to tell me why they’d chosen this café over the dozen others on the same street. Baristas were even more revealing, sharp behind the machine, clearly running the show on the floor, but surprisingly hazy when I asked them about the brand they work for: who owns it, what it stands for, where it’s headed next. That gap, between the craft on display and the story underneath it, is something I want to dig into as branding as become more important than ever before.

This week’s Café Dispatch includes: how India’s specialty coffee scene is shaping demand in ways I didn’t anticipate, where coffee chains seem to succeed more easily here than they do elsewhere, and top news of the week

If you’re living in a big city, I have a feeling you’re seeing something similar to what I am: coffee shops opening and chasing whatever trend is loudest that month. I’m not always convinced there’s real research behind it, or that the people making these decisions have the background to justify every one of them, but one thing is consistent: Japandi design is still everywhere. It’s just now wrapped around a specific hook, music, art, whatever else, as long as it gives people one more reason to walk in beyond the coffee itself.

Scouring the Lodhi district in New Delhi, few cafés actually have a personality, because being intentional is probably the hardest skill required for anyone who gets into specialty coffee hoping it’s also a fast way to make money.

A few cafés gave me exactly that impression: an aesthetic borrowed straight from the Instagram algorithm, with no real system in place to communicate their values or explain why they serve the coffee they do. In fact, I had to pull up their Instagram to learn more about the café than I did by walking in.

That said, a handful of cafés did stand out, and if you’re curious, don’t miss next week’s longer cultural dive into them.

My takeaway from one day in India alone: if you want to be the next café, the kind of place people will drive across the city for, especially in a market like this, interior design alone won’t do it. You need something that actually pulls people to you, and something that makes them want to stay once they’re there. I know a major buzzword, still today for many is, community. But as a café, you need to think deeper about what that is for the people coming to your café. How does it look like, what does it mean to them, how can you ensure that regardless of your location you can create it… and so on.

Speaking less of community and maybe more of virality for a market like India, Bokka café in Mumbai is making a lot of noise. Would you go?

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Toko Kopi Tuku, Indonesia.

This is the one I want to see with my own eyes. Tuku is a Jakarta-born coffee chain that doesn’t really resemble a café at all but rather an excellent brand world execution.

Tuku is credited with kicking off the entire kopi susu kekinian wave in Indonesia: iced milk coffee sweetened with palm sugar (arenga), sold cheap, sold fast, and built almost entirely around mobile ordering through Gojek and Grab rather than a seating experience. Some outlets barely function as a place to sit at all, they’re closer to a coffee kiosk optimised for a delivery rider to grab and go. That alone is a complete inversion of the “immersive third space” thinking I usually write about here.

But the part that’s really well executed and works is the branding. Tuku calls its customers tetangga, “neighbours,” and has built an entire identity around that: a merch line (Toserbaku) selling socks, umbrellas and stainless mugs, a running series of “neighbour” spotlights on ordinary people (a parking attendant, a group of cyclists, palm sugar farmers), and, memorably, an “NFT Neighbours” drop a few years back. It reads less like a coffee brand and more like a cultural membership scheme that happens to sell coffee.

I want to go because nothing about this model exists in Europe. We don’t have a café brand here that’s simultaneously a delivery-first FMCG operation, a merch label and a loyalty-through-community-storytelling machine, at the scale Tuku has pulled it off in Indonesia. I’d want to see how a “café” without much of a café functions as a physical space at all, and what that means for the neighbourhoods it’s actually embedded in.

What I’ll be ordering: the Kopi Susu Tetangga, the original, no substitutions.

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• All Day Roasting Company from Taipei was named Asia’s Best Roaster at the 2026 Global Coffee Awards, sweeping multiple categories in a competition that pulled entries from India, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and beyond. It’s the first year the Awards ran a dedicated Asia edition, and honestly, it’s overdue. Hong Kong’s oma Coffee Roaster and Thailand’s Addicto Coffee also picked up top honours.

• Arabica prices posted their biggest single-day jump since 2022 after torrential rain hit Brazil’s growing regions, while robusta hit a five-month high on worries about Vietnam’s 2026/27 crop. Every trend piece I write about design and ritual sits on top of a supply chain that’s getting more volatile by the season, which is worth remembering considering how heavily this impacts new openings, but also coffee menus across the world.

• Wayne’s Coffee, the 58-café Swedish chain, filed for bankruptcy over mounting rent debts, though the brand itself will keep operating under new ownership. A reminder that inflation and shrinking footfall are squeezing even established chains, not just independents.

If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,

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It’s been a very busy week and weekend, hosting a friend but also spending time furnishing our home in Ericeira all while working on my next chapter. My consulting for Perfect Daily Grind is coming to an end - it was a blissful 6 months of learning and growing, but it’s time to take on new projects and give The Coffee Dispatch some extra ❤️

More news coming at the end of this month but if you are a coffee company and are looking for creative directing, branding and growth support - reach out 💌

There are two different coffee markets, the one that feels saturated (Paris, Shanghai, London and other big metropolises) and the one that is coming to terms that people do enjoy a good cup of coffee and that means, preferably NO Illy, Lavazza or commercial coffee available at your local grocery store.

For the former, and after a hectic few days in Brussels, I believe we will see a third market emerge within that environment.

The ultra-luxurious cafés. The ones that feel like stepping into a 4 Seasons but for no more than hour and to drink exceptional coffee.

We’re already seeing it with the likes of Substance in Paris and Cokuun or Koffee Mameya Kakeru in Tokyo. Omakase style cafés where the ritual is exponentially more incredible.

I wouldn’t call this a 4th wave but rather a parallel universe those with very developed palate will seek in order to have a different, yet more luxurious experience.

The flat white as we know it has no longer exciting and the V60 which is adored by the specialty coffee community is becoming an art. And when you elevate a daily ritual into an art, the environment must match because the craft gets expensive and perceived value has to help in elevating that expectation.

Of course, these quadrants could contain far more cafés than the few mapped here. But one pattern is already visible: cafés that sit in the “exclusive” half, whether that exclusivity comes from high prices or from craft and community, tend to remain obsessive about interior design.

I keep returning to Noir Coffee Shop and Café Nuances in Paris. At Noir, it is the immersive shock of moody curves, travertine surfaces, and a 1970s palette; at Nuances’ Marais location, it is the art-deco futurism of Uchronia’s red-lit interiors. Both treat the first five seconds of walking through the door as part of the product.

However, as we look at the lower half of the map, accessibility usually demands a trade-off. The experience becomes less immersive and more automated, closer to tapping through a mobile app than to stepping into a room. The exception is the expensive-but-accessible quadrant, where scale and budget buy back some atmosphere: high ceilings, polished stone, a sense of grandeur that still lets anyone walk in off the street.

Can you think of a café that somehow breaks this rule and manages to be cheap, everywhere, and still immersive from the first five seconds?

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Terarosa in South Korea.

I am in the midst of building an inventory of the few café chains I am truly impressed with. What I want to arrive at, by the time the work is done, is a framework for how to scale without losing the essence of a brand.

Because scaling is hard. It often leads founders to a place where they want to sell, simply because they no longer recognise themselves, or their initial dream, in what the business has become. That drift is no surprise; with growth comes the weight of decisions about salaries, expenses, and expansion that pull you away from the original ‘why.’

But after speaking with a coffee founder this week, and asking him which café had changed him as a person, he mentioned Terarosa. The word he used was class, an adjective I have rarely heard in relation to cafés. So, naturally, I got curious.

Although I haven’t visited any of their branches yet, they all look immense.

A bit of a reminder of C Market Coffee in Vancouver but with a very different style, different materials and look. To me, they ultimately feel like colleges - or rather, huge study rooms.

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• London cafe The Coffee Studio is fighting a trademark battle with FTSE 250 giant Mitchells & Butlers over its “Eat Drink Work” slogan, which the corporate hospitality group claims is too similar to its “Eat Drink Meet” trademark. Owner Tahir Mehmet, who founded the two-branch indie café in 2024, is being backed by Alan Sugar’s Trade Mark Wizards. It is a stark reminder that when independents try to own their language, the giants do not always let them.

• Rosslyn Coffee just opened its tenth boutique store in London, landing on historic Cheapside by St Paul’s Cathedral. Founded in 2018 by former Caravan Coffee employees, the operator is proving that independents can scale without selling out; quality and consistency still win in the Square Mile.

• Palermo roaster Morettino is growing arabica coffee in Sicily as warming conditions turn the Italian island into a new frontier for tropical crops. After decades of experimental cultivation, the family roastery is pioneering truly homegrown European espresso, proof that climate change is rewriting the coffee map from the soil up. Also - how beautiful is this article and the pictures?!

If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,

Thank you for being here. If you love reading The Coffee Dispatch and want to support the newsletter, the easiest ways are to like this post, leave a comment, share it with a friend, or upgrade to a paid subscription.

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If you’ve visited Paris in the last six months, you’ll notice a pattern among the new wave of Asian-influenced cafés: they’re small, seating is scarce, and when you do find a chair you’re sitting close enough to your neighbour to hear their conversation. Yet the coffee is very good, so people queue anyway.

So when I came across C Market Coffee in the local Vancouver press and saw a Korean-influenced café doing the exact opposite; massive spaces, generous seating, room to spread out, I was curious enough to chase down an interview.

After a few false starts around Bridgette’s schedule, we finally got on a call, and I got to hear the story behind C Market: her path from a single Q-grader’s passion project to a four-location company, and why she keeps building bigger rooms while the rest of the specialty coffee world builds smaller ones.

C Market takes its name from the global Arabica commodity exchange, the system that ultimately sets the price of coffee at its most basic level. For Bridgette, that’s the point: no matter how polished the café or how creative the menu, everything is built on the quality of the raw ingredient.

“I’ve always believed that no matter how beautiful a café is, or how creative the menu becomes, everything is built on the quality of the raw ingredients,” she told me. “It starts from the source.” Naming the brand after the exchange was a way of building that philosophy in from the foundation up.

As the brand has grown, the letter has taken on a second meaning. The “C” now stands for four pillars; Coffee, Culture, Connection, and Community, and “Market” points to the exchange of ideas and people the space is meant to hold. It’s also where the company’s slogan comes from: where every sip sparks connection.

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Hello everyone, another week, another Café Dispatch and I’m now wondering if,

On another note I am writing this letter from Ericeira, as you know if you read my previous letter, but this time from Kelp, a co-working space, which is only a 2-minute walk from my house. Small town life can be really awesome. Sadly though Kelp is not a coffee-first co-working space so whenever I need my caffeine hit, I take a stroll back home.

Though I must admit after WoC Brussels I feel I need a million more gadgets to get better flat whites out of my espresso machine. I now have an excuse do to my favourite thing - coffee shopping.

We’ve had a busy spring and summer so far, with sports events taking over our TVs, social media, sports bars; you name it, they’re showing it. Between the World Cup, Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and more, I feel like I don’t even need to watch to stay updated on the wins and losses.

But another interesting thing happening alongside all of these events is the number of coffee brand collaborations with athletes. And to me this is exciting (as exciting as the On and Erewhon collab starting in May this year) because sports brands know that both, any sport really and coffee, are about bringing people together.

It makes sense that the two would start merging. In a world where sports personalities now have massive social media followings and are increasingly gaining visibility, Lavazza’s deal with Sinner (extended until 2030 back in November 2025) remains the reigning tennis-coffee storyline heading into hard-court season.

But here are a few more which I stumbled upon in the various newsletters I’ve signed up for,

• Throne SPORT COFFEE’s “Better Fuel for Every You” campaign
  Patrick Mahomes fronts a new campaign, launched via a collab Instagram post with Throne SPORT COFFEE, that leans into his many hyphens, elite athlete, businessman, dad, and golfer. He’s now also a shareholder of Throne (ofc!). But what I love with this campaign is highlighting how we’re all more than 1 thing. In an era where generalists were often ashamed, we’re being reminded that multiplicity is a beautiful thing.

• La Colombe × U.S. Soccer, “Must Be the Coffee”
  La Colombe, the Official Coffee Partner of U.S. Soccer, launched a campaign built around Philadelphia’s underdog sports spirit, timed to this summer’s USMNT run. The campaign launched on June 12 to coincide with the team’s first World Cup match, a 4-1 win over Paraguay.

• Bluestone Lane × CommBank Socceroos
  This is the one that made me dig into sports x coffee partnerships. It just feels like the most authentic version of this whole trend. Bluestone Lane became the Official Coffee Partner of the CommBank Socceroos, timed to their U.S.-based tournament run this summer. A Bluestone Lane barista literally travels with the team, pulling the same Maverick espresso served in all of the brand’s cafés.

This is definitely the summer coffee brands stopped sponsoring sports and started living inside team infrastructure from baristas traveling with squads, athlete-shareholders instead of just spokespeople, and RTD packaging tied to real-time tournament runs rather than static logo deals.

Coffee brands have understood one thing when it comes to staying relevant and gaining market share: it’s essential to partner with global movements where die-hard fans are numerous and will take any cue from their favourite teams or athletes. And frankly, it clicks. Sport and coffee are both rituals built on togetherness, so pairing them up isn’t a stretch, it’s almost obvious in hindsight.

So what’s the next partnership we’re all dreaming of when it comes to sports and coffee?

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World of Coffee Brussels hosted the most exciting competition - at least the one I couldn’t wait to be there for: the 100 best coffee shops worldwide.

The list is out, and if you look past the obvious Nordic and Anglo names crowding the top, the Europe rankings are many with Anglo-Irish cafés dominating. Nearly 20% of the spots, the Iberian Peninsula is punching above its weight with 11 entries (something I never thought would happen after having coffee 5 years ago in Spain and regretting the order), and the edge markets are finally breaking through.

Belarus, Azerbaijan, Albania, Georgia, Armenia. These are not the countries that dominated coffee conversation a year ago and yet here they are, shoulder to shoulder with Oslo and Copenhagen.

Also, the “lab” concept has become the new roastery, and specialty coffee has stopped being a London-Paris-Berlin triangle. It is now a continental phenomenon, from Minsk to Tbilisi to Skopje.

Beyond the top 10, here are the two cafés I have pinned on Google Maps to visit ASAP.

• Kitchen Coffee Roasters in Minsk (#100)

• Shavi Coffee Roasters in Tbilisi (#33)

Neither of them made the top 10, are the most Instagram-famous cafés on the list, or benefit from the traffic London would, but they represent how specialty coffee is pushing into new markets.

Kitchen Coffee operating out of Belarus, where importing green coffee is a logistical Rubik’s cube, proves that community and quality can open markets that traditional trade routes ignored

And Shavi Coffee Roasters, a Georgian roastery sitting at #33 is building a culture from the soil up in a region most specialty maps still leave blank.

I cannot wait to visit both because I want to see how founders operate when they do not have the luxury of an established supply chain or a customer base that already knows what a V60 is. That is where real innovation because survival depends on it.

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• Ferrero Pocket Coffee - a chocolate shell hiding a full shot of espresso, invented in 1968 for Italian road trips without coffee bars is blowing up on TikTok. The original grab-and-go caffeine fix, now retro enough to be new.

• A new European Coffee Federation report confirms Europe drinks 28% of the world’s coffee, generating €84.4 billion and 1.5 million jobs. 87% of them in cafés and restaurants.

• The K-Café has moved from Seoul to North American menus: cheese foam, dalgona, and cloud matcha are now growing faster than dirty soda at its peak. South Korea’s coffee market hit $13 billion and 31% of the entire country’s beverage sector, and Paris Baguette is already past 200 U.S. locations targeting 1,000.

If you enjoyed this edition, don’t miss these past editions,

Thank you for being here. If you love reading The Coffee Dispatch and want to support the newsletter, the easiest ways are to like this post, leave a comment, share it with a friend, or upgrade to a paid subscription.

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I arrived in Paris on Tuesday night, delighted by the 16°C/60°F air, because in all honesty, working and writing in the heat felt impossible. My brain literally melted every time I typed a string of words, or tried to synthesise a busy week at the biggest European tradeshow of the year.

Anyway, that was five days ago, and right now I’m luckily sitting at my new dining table in Ericeira, a small fishing village a 30-minute drive from Lisbon and putting together this long letter.

I’ve now had time to digest World of Coffee Brussels and my short holiday in Antwerp, and I have a feeling that this morning, as you sip your cup of joe, reading about innovation in this space through a European lens might be exactly what you’re in the mood for.

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I should say upfront: I’m not the kind of person who obsesses over varietals, single origins, or the roasting machine behind my coffee. I get obsessed with how cafés shape their neighbourhoods, through design, drinks, food, and the people running the show. So this piece is very much a blend about what WoC Brussels and Antwerp told me about where our industry is headed.

Let’s get into it.

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As much as we romanticize the coffee industry, the software side of things has historically lagged behind. Sure, there is plenty of tech for roasters profiling their beans, but on the consumer side, knowledge is often locked behind YouTube tutorials or buried in obscure Reddit threads.

Always searching for the latest innovations, I found COFFI - the app that helps you save your favourite beans and roasters in one place, after reading about them on LinkedIn (my second favourite social platform - i know…). I reached out to Gilad, one of the cofounders, who does not come from the traditional coffee world. He grew up in California and attended a project-based tech university in Berlin.

As you know, I usually interview café owners and roasters for this newsletter, but since I spent a decade in tech right after selling The Blend and before jumping back into it, bringing in a tech founder felt like the perfect wild card.

Gilad and his co-founder Ben are building what is essentially the “Vivino of coffee.” It is a beautifully designed, data-driven app built to track, rate, and recommend specialty coffee based on actual consumer preference rather than basic surveys. We sat down to talk about how data is changing coffee consumption, why the industry needs a pure “coffee score,” and the stark differences between global coffee - mostly café cultures.

From VC burnout to bootstrapping

Before diving into the coffee world, Gilad went through the tech wringer. He founded a B2B climate tech startup right out of university. As he described it, they took the “traditional route”: they raised money, over-hired, fired, burned through their cash, and ultimately closed it down.

That experience completely shifted how he wanted to build his next venture. Instead of taking venture capital and scaling too fast, Gilad and Ben completely bootstrapped the COFFI app. They spent a year scraping data while building their app, proving that once again the best way to create a consumer app while having fun is to stay lean and avoid the VC treadmill.

But the actual idea for the app did not come from drinking tons of coffee, it came from watching his father navigate the specialty coffee world.

Gilad’s dad had taken a traditional coffee course while visiting Italy before tumbling down the specialty coffee rabbit hole. When visiting Gilad in Berlin, his dad would explore the city’s legendary coffee scene. That is when Gilad noticed a glaring problem.

“He would go up to the coffee wall, take a picture of the bag, try to find it online, try to find the data he wanted in order to buy. The baristas didn’t know. The web search didn’t find it. There was so much friction. And then he showed me his Apple Notes, and he had pictures of coffee bags and ratings that he did. I was like, wait. “Why is there no app that lets you do all this?”

He called Ben right away and Ben was instantly hooked. Neither of them could stop thinking about it.

Gilad immediately thought of Vivino, the massive wine scanning app. He realized that if coffee was becoming just as personal and complex as wine, consumers needed a dedicated system of record.

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I’m heading to Brussels for World of Coffee but also to hang out with one of my best friends (hey Judy 👋🏼) coming all the way from Canada so, let me tell you, the anticipation is real.

It will be my first time visiting Brussels and Antwerp, and I can’t wait after watching a few documentaries, a city known for its architecture, its surrealists, its Art Nouveau interiors… and yes, for its coffee too.

This country has a coffee story that goes much, much further back than many would believe. And it starts in Antwerp, a place I’ll be visiting shortly after the World of Coffee.

Antwerp being one of Europe’s most significant port cities since the 16th century, was the primary entry point for green coffee arriving in this part of the world. Yes it has a port so it makes sense. Merchants here were among the first Europeans to get their hands on it and rather than just drinking it, they turned the city into a continental distribution hub, essentially fuelling the coffee trade across the rest of Europe.

The early “cafés” were simply merchant houses where traders would sample what had just arrived from the East over heated arguments about prices and politics. (Some things don’t change that much.)

While Antwerp handled the import, Brussels started cultivating the culture around coffee drinking. And it happened very early: the very first coffee house in Brussels opened its doors in 1615. That predates the iconic coffee houses of Venice and London by decades.

Brussels was ahead of the curve and just like Paris, and its famous Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots, Brussels developed its own grand café culture, one shaped as much by Art Nouveau architecture as by whom visited for coffee.

A few of those originals are still standing:

• La Fleur en Papier Doré: One of the oldest cafés in Brussels, and once the regular haunt of the Belgian surrealists, René Magritte included.

• Le Falstaff: Opened in 1903, and still one of the most stunning examples of Art Nouveau design in the city which reminds me a lot of Bewley’s Grafton Street café in Dublin.

Antwerp brought the beans to Europe’s shores, and Brussels turned the act of drinking them into a cultural institution, just like Paris did. So of course I’m ecstatic.

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With the Brussels trip on my mind, I have been keeping an eye on the incredible café concepts popping up across the city ahead of the expo. Here are three spots that I cannot wait to visit:

1. MOK Specialty Coffee Roastery & Bar

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a space like this one before. A huge kitchen island in what feels like a garage. I really like it because it feels homey and ideal for cupping sessions. It’s also held by two times Belgian Cup Tasters Champion Jens Crabbé so coffee must be incredible. I’ll report more soon.

2. Bouche

They literally opened their third location on June 23rd (!) which is perfect timing really. I can’t wait to visit their new location and get a sense of how they do coffee. It’s been said that they serve Wide Awake coffee and have iconic coffee cups which is the kind of things I love - details!

3. Wide Awake Coffee

They have 3 locations and each café has a very distinct look. But mostly what attracted me is them defining themselves as a contemporary coffee company. I’m curious to know more and what that truly means when visiting their café and tasting their exceptional coffee which they source and roast. I’ll be interviewing them later this month - so join our chat if you have questions!

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• A new café in Seattle just opened and it runs like a cocktail bar. Gloom Coffee uses a centrifuge to clarify fruit juices, makes “pseudo citrus” from upcycled fruit rinds, and serves drinks like a Piña Colada espresso and a carbonated Kenyan coffee with blueberry rooibos and cardamom-nutmeg coconut milk. This all sounds very chemical to me- almost like potions but heck - this is where we’re headed.

• Attention Coffee in Portland opened inside a gym. They actually built a menu around it, with a pre-workout Pump Cooler (coconut water, beetroot, maca, cordyceps) and a post-workout Tart Cherry recovery drink alongside the espresso menu. It’s all about proteins and gym and I think it’s quite fun to see something this obvious take place. Why not make the gym your favourite café too.

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And while the heat had me mostly indoors, I’ve been speaking with a lot of people in the independent coffee chains space. Of course, this is Paris-centred or maybe EU-centred as I am here right now.

In this piece:

• Why Paris coffee scene isn’t oversaturated

• The one cultural detail that explains everything about how coffee chains think

• The French brands proving you can scale without losing your soul and where they’re headed next

But I want to speak about it because it seems that many coffee experts in Paris are worried about the number of cafés opening on a daily basis, and to be fair, it might be alarming. My take? I think it’s not and here’s why.

To have an opinion on the subject, it’s essential to understand how Paris thinks. I won’t dare suggest I fully do, but from all my research and observations, I feel this might be why.

1. Paris has multiple villages which we call arrondissements. Many locals will never travel outside their arrondissement during the week unless they commute for work. Essentially, many of us travel to an arrondissement for something special, or to meet friends. Hence being blessed with your favourite café a few minutes away from home feels awesome - I would never say no to a Candle Kids #2 in my area if they were ever to open.

2. Alongside that, Paris holds an enormous amount of stores that specialise. The other morning, as we were having coffee at Motors Coffee, I turned around to read vintage signs on the building across - a proud family business specialising in creating the best rat and mice traps, the most ingenious traps you’d ever find in Paris, since 1872.

Many of those exist in Paris alone, and I believe this has a deep impact on how most cafés and restaurants think about their interior design, about being a destination - an immersive experience. Just like the brand new art installation on Pont Neuf by JR where it isn’t only about the looks of it but about walking inside it and feeling something. One can easily refer to Ramdane Touhami and how he thinks about branding - the way he designed each store for Officine Universelle Buly.

Passion and obsession come together easily in most cafés, restaurants, and places you walk into in this city. Long term thinking and legacy are part of the French DNA and it shows in most cafés you walk into.

3. Just like Silicon Valley propels startups to unicorn status, I see Paris doing something similar with coffee chains. It is opening the next generation of café chains we want to visit and linger at. Noir Coffee Shop, Café Nuances, and Cuvée Noire offer soul, thoughtful interior design and good coffee. Things slowly dismissed in most coffee chains abroad.

It’s all happening because when you build in a city that holds high standards and refuses to let you be mediocre, you have to keep overdelivering. The rents are high, the locals are unforgiving, and the standard - set over centuries of obsessive specialisation - is not negotiable.

So what survives is really good and what is really good eventually travels - see how Noir Coffee Shop is opening in Mayfair. But my guess is that Paris is not running out of ideas, instead it’s exporting them but always with the intention to build something long-term. It’s not a surprise that the best haute couture companies are made in France.

So as for the café chains that are French, most of them follow that playbook: let’s open several to please our beloved customers living in different arrondissements. Let’s also give them an experience. Which means a new location isn’t just expansion, it’s a village getting access to a destination it didn’t have before.

I think Café Nuances is especially good at it, but so is Noir Coffee Shop - they work with interior designers and give more than good specialty coffee, here’s how:

• Take Café Nuances. Founded by brothers Charles and Raphaël Corrot, they now have five locations spread across different arrondissements - the 1st near Place Vendôme, the 4th in the Marais, the 6th in Saint-Germain, the 8th in the Golden Triangle, and a fifth just announced in the 7th on rue de Bellechasse. Each one is a distinct design experiment. The Marais location, designed by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios, is stainless steel bathed in electric orange, furniture shaped like crushed coffee cups, inspired by Nouveau Réalisme. The 1st is Art Deco marble. The 8th is a futuristic retro sunset. Same coffee, entirely different world each time - and not only do you feel it in real life but their Instagram reflects that philosophy incredibly well.

  

• And then there is Noir Coffee Shop. If Nuances is about design spectacle, Noir Coffee Shop is about quiet ubiquity done beautifully - a minimalist specialty coffee shop that has somehow managed to be in over twenty locations across Paris, from Concorde to Abbesses to Cardinal Lemoine to the Île Saint-Louis, and is now opening in London’s Mayfair. They are everywhere and yet each spot feels considered because they prioritise craft over trends. Just look at their I

  nstagram and cafés, and the way they go about location picks. They are not trying to be a crazy design experiment, they’re aiming to be your favourite local spot, which, as you can guess, in Paris, is the highest compliment you can receive.

  

Both are proof that the playbook works.

Where I think it does get complicated and where the experts’ worry becomes more legitimate, it is when cafés open without that obsession. Because Paris is also an incredibly unforgiving city in that sense. Locals notice. They notice the corner that was cut, the chair that isn’t comfortable, the coffee that is good but not worth crossing an arrondissement for.

I also think there’s something fascinating happening with the next generation of café founders here. Many of them have travelled, worked in Melbourne or London or Tokyo, and come back with a very specific goal.

Indeed, a city that keeps raising its own bar (on an international scene) isn’t a city that struggles (yes, many café owners do, I know), but it also shows that there are passionate people who just keep making their dreams come true.

So maybe it isn’t whether Paris has too many cafés and coffee chains, maybe it’s whether the ones opening have considered all of the above (and more) to open their café in the right arrondissement with the best brainstormed concept first.

If you are in a city where coffee chains are exploding, what have you been observing?

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This week’s Café Dispatch includes: a branding deep dive I’ve been sitting with, two cafés I visited, and the US consumers love their specialty coffee

Spending time looking for new cafés on social media or across platforms gives you a pretty decent idea of where café branding currently stands. A lot of beautiful design encompassing new concepts but also places that to me are feeling more like the kind of warm environments we’re seeking.

I’ve been noticing three small things in particular, both in the cafés I’ve actually walked in and in what’s circulating in the industry right now.

1. The brand lives in the details

It sounds really like an evidence, an obvious statement most interior designers would make when creating a space. But ultimately it is very true. The cafés that you remember and recommend rarely stay with you because of their names.

They stick because of a feeling: the way a drink was brought to your table on a cute tray with a glass of water and a small attention, the way the seating was organised so that you get a nice view but also privacy, and so on. We’re sensitive to details and we can tell when something has been intentionally designed. Right?

Tenfold Coffee in Houston said to Fresh Cup recently: “The fundamentals have to be right, but hospitality is the X-factor.” They deliver drinks to tables rather than calling out names and know that this matters more than we think.

Essentially, the lesson here is to learn how to encode your values into the daily texture of the experience across every touch point.

2. Values matter more than ever

We keep repeating and hearing the same speech about values and there’s a reason for that - not enough cafés know how to do it!

It’s not about translating them to your tone of voice or your colour palette… It’s about knowing what you won’t compromise on - you won’t let happen and transgress on.

And logically, scaling, growing and hiring more people often leads to compromising and cutting corners or worse, implementing shortcuts with the hope no one will realise. Not only does it demote staff but it will absolutely despair your customers. I mean, look at Starbucks 🫣

Your operating philosophy is the foundation of everything that follows. Story and Soil Coffee in Hartford made specialty coffee feel accessible and non-intimidating from day one by thinking about how they trained their team, how they talked about what they serve, how they shaped the space to feel like it was for everyone. Details but paired with their values and it made magic happen.

3. Ditching socials to focus on in real life experience

I had to laugh when I returned to Instagram after a six-month hiatus, having wiped my account entirely. Quite a few cafés that used to post regularly have since stopped posting altogether.

We’re all noticing it, people are tired of social media, AI and living an online parallel life. And I really do get it, but also I’ve been convinced most of my adult life that businesses could not do without.

Two cafés have been vocal about it,

Anthology Coffee in Detroit has 16,000 Instagram followers and barely posts anymore. Since stepping back from the platform, the business has actually grown faster than when they were actively investing in it. More time to give people a great experience, less time for posting - the math does add up.

Seasons Coffee in Sacramento made a deliberate choice to leave space for customers to find them and share that discovery themselves. “If we’re just promoting it ourselves, it’s not cool anymore,” says owner Greg Cotta.

And I must say, we do love walking into an amazing café randomly when visiting a city.

What else have you noticed that you think should make it onto the list?

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Last week was a quiet coffee week because I kept myself busy with hands-on hobbies. Painting for one, walking a lot! and shopping at bookstores, and then calling my grandma repeatedly while also hosting two dinners and meeting a dear friend for a ballet session on Monday night. I’ve been in my season of saying YES to nearly everything coming my way, and it’s been fun (but also a tiny bit tiring).

• Terrah Coffee Roasters - A stylish café where the coffee is just really good although more expensive than most cafés around. But they roast it themselves in Paris, and they’re one of the few spaces I found to be very thoughtfully designed. Also you can bring your laptop which is a big plus in a city where most cafés ban you from doing so.

• Cuvée Noire - I’ve been watching this brand for a while, one I love their brand colours - Blue Klein has always been a favourite and two, their specialty-grade coffee starts at €2. Every location is designed differently by an interior design firm and they’re clearly listening to their customers.

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• Researchers just brewed espresso with sound waves. A team at UNSW Sydney pulled a shot using ultrasonic vibrations and cold water. Blind tasters couldn’t tell the difference from a real espresso. It uses 75% less energy than a traditional machine. I don’t know if it’ll ever make it behind a bar, but I love that someone tried.

• Specialty coffee just got a seat at the grown-ups’ table. The James Beard Awards has two coffee bars as finalists this year: Onyx Coffee Lab (Outstanding Bar) and endorffeine (Outstanding Professional) and voted ...

• Portland banned foie gras last week and now, Kopi Luwak might be too. The city’s new force-feeding ban is reigniting debate about civet coffee, the one made from beans passed through captive civets that are force-fed... Sprudge picked up the thread.

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Now that I’ve spent some time sitting down with founders for these interviews, I’ve come to realize that the conversations I genuinely enjoy the most are the ones where, days after we’ve parted ways, I find myself still quoting the person I spoke to, turning their words over in my head because what they said wasn’t just memorable, but held a kind of universal truth that struck a chord and kept me thinking long after the recording stopped.

And speaking to Alex Shaw was exactly like that.

He is the kind of person, an ex-professional rugby player, who will look you in the eye and say things exactly the way they are, with absolutely no beating around the bush. When I asked him how he managed to stay motivated while trying to build his coffee roasting business from the ground up during a period when he was couchsurfing, he said:

“The Shopify app makes this amazing sound when someone buys something from you. This ka-ching sound is what kept me going every time I thought about giving up. It sounds silly but knowing people want to pay for what you create is how you keep going.”

I am one to say I would completely agree with that sentiment, because making money online is a wild and untamed experience that we constantly read and hear about from others, but until we are the ones actually experiencing it ourselves, it feels almost unreal.

The moment a popcorn machine became a business

Alex, who is Leicester-born and enjoyed an incredible 13-year professional rugby career where he chalked up nearly 250 games for Doncaster Knights, Leicester Tigers, Sale Sharks, and Nottingham before finally retiring at 31, is terribly humble about his journey, openly admitting that without the warmth of his family to fall back on when he came home from Australia after deciding to retire, he simply wouldn’t have made it.

His deep obsession with coffee didn’t start with a grand business plan but rather with a simple, passing conversation with a sponsor of his rugby team who had invested in specialty coffee and began talking to him about origin countries, roasting profiles, and what actually makes a cup genuinely good.

Alex went home, fell entirely down the rabbit hole, and started roasting beans in his own kitchen using an actual popcorn machine, giving the resulting bags away to his rugby teammates for free just to share what he was making.

Then, one of them handed him a 5-pound note.

“Stop giving this away. This is good. If you keep coming with it, I’ll pay.”

He framed that note, and to this date, he still has it proudly hanging on the wall as a constant reminder that the day someone actually wanted to reach into their pocket and pay for his coffee was the day he finally felt ready to turn this passion into a real business.

“I saw it almost as a real-life MBA. I’d do my research and learn about advertising, website creation, product design, marketing, branding, a bit of everything. I thought the worst-case scenario was I’d have a pretty cool story at the end of it.”

A guaranteed customer of one, proving the concept to himself, and finding a way to tell the story, that is really where the heart of Kickback Coffee began.

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This week’s Café Dispatch includes: a café where a flat white will take literally 10 seconds to produce, the power of a napuccino, three cafés I visited this month which I loved and two I must go to this week.

I heard myself scream NOOO when I saw this reel earlier this week on Instagram (yes, I’m back on this hell-ish app, but purely for research though!).. eyes nearly watering, I watched Ryan filming Project Zero in Melbourne selling him a flat white that took under 15 seconds to make.

And many of you are totally fine with that as long as it tastes good. Well I am not doing fine, in fact, I’d rather go back to having coffee at home, feeling impatient for my Bialetti or espresso machine to warm up. But then, delighted with the smell of coffee and that first morning sip.

Many argue that busy cafés benefit from all that automation and I might slightly agree with that when those cafés are in bustling streets where people line up for more than 10 minutes on a Monday morning to work. There’s a place and a moment for it, see what I mean?

But if you aren’t churning that much coffee on a daily basis, please stay with the craft. The entire narrative of specialty coffee is that moment - this liminal space - between ordering that coffee, hanging out at the bar, or by the entrance while chatting with the other customers.

It’s that little slice of time where even though you may be very coffee needy, the idea of someone dialling in that espresso after checking and testing the machine, picking the right beans maybe even suggesting a blend or a single origin for your choice of drinks, the music in the background, the entire thing really . that’s what getting a coffee is about.

And this reminded me very much of haute couture in fashion. There’s nothing quite as beautiful, ephemeral as this collection that few can wear but an entire team thought about and then by hand sewed every piece together to make it this incredible item. Coffee should be the same. Voilà.

How do you feel about that 👇🏽 ?

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I am in Paris for another few weeks, and so far, three cafés are very much worth mentioning:

1. Résidence Kann
   There are two cafés from KANN which is a furniture design company initially who opened a café to showcase their work and rotate furnitures and deco regularly. A “living” café where one day you’ll get a specific vibe and six months later, the space is completely different.

2. Press Coffee
   A tiny coffee bar on the corner of a building where there is more seating outside than inside. You’re walking into the coffee machine bar, and facing the barista. Unless you truly dislike socialising with baristas, then stay away. But very good coffee from Cayo and Tanat will await you.

   

3. Café Perlant
   A French-Turkish café where pastries are inspired from Turkey, and where the coffee is excellent. It’s small and very fashionable. I sat there waiting for a friend, I was a little early and, many very stylish women walked in. Yet, it’s a cute poodle that caught all my attention until she arrived.

I have saved a few new places, one of them being Luciko and Legacy Coffee.

1. Luciko’s interior design is warm and friendly. They utilise Modbar’s epresso machine which is really a sign they care about their customers.

2. Legacy Coffee is actually selling coffee from their family farm in Colombia. It’s literally farm to table if we think of it as how rare it is for cafés to actually be producers as well. I’m very curious.

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• There’s a strategy to stay very effective all while rested. The Nappuccino. A tactic - shame on me - I hadn’t heard of before. If you’ve tried it, please let us know how it went.

• Peet’s has officially opened applications for the most coveted role of the summer: chief playlist officer. The coffee brand is calling on music-loving coffee drinkers nationwide to submit their ultimate “Middle Ground Mix”, a personally curated playlist designed to turn up the energy, sharpen focus, and provide a soundtrack for the final hours of the workday.

• This is great news considering I will be moving to Portugal in July this year, and so World of Coffee Lisbon happening in 2027, just confirms that this is the coffee place to be 🙃

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