The Top 14 Coffee Trends of 2025

Specialty

Coffee used to be a habit. Now, it’s a hobby—with provenance.

The rise of specialty coffee isn’t just about taste—it’s about identity. Consumers are no longer satisfied with generic blends or “medium roast.” They want to know the exact altitude, varietal, and drying method. Single-origin beans from places like Yemen or Ethiopia come with not just distinct flavor notes, but geopolitical stories—of smallholder farmers, centuries-old techniques, and cultural resilience. That narrative is part of the product.

At the same time, there’s growing fatigue with sameness. Chains like Starbucks made coffee ubiquitous, but also homogenous. Specialty cafés offer a counter-experience: local, intentional, and curated. They’ve become lifestyle spaces as much as beverage stops—designed for third places, Instagram feeds, and personal rituals.

Much like wine or craft beer before it, coffee has moved into the realm of connoisseurship. Tasting notes now include “stone fruit,” “bergamot,” and “fermented funk.” Subscription services deliver rare micro-lots. Homebrewers measure grind size and water temperature with lab-level precision.

This isn’t just about what’s in the cup. It’s about the shift from caffeine as fuel to coffee as craftsmanship—from utility to story.

Mushroom-infused

Coffee used to be about energy. Now it’s about balance.

Mushroom-infused coffee blends are gaining traction not because people want less caffeine—but because they want smarter caffeine. Fueled by rising anxiety levels and a broader shift toward wellness trends that prioritize calm and clarity over stimulation, consumers are rethinking their daily coffee ritual. Products that once promised energy now offer focus, immunity, and mood support—often in the same cup.

At the core are adaptogenic mushrooms like lion’s mane and chaga. Long used in traditional medicine, they’re now being folded into existing routines, not as pills but as sippable habits. It’s part of a larger shift in supplement trends, where the line between functional food and daily ritual continues to blur.

The rise of “clean caffeine” is also a response to sleep disruption, burnout, and the growing self-awareness around hidden lifestyle stressors—like that second or third cup. And it hasn’t happened in isolation. Brands like Four Sigmatic rode the podcast wave, embedding themselves in the routines of biohackers, creators, and early adopters who didn’t just endorse it—they made it part of their morning show.

This isn’t just about a new kind of coffee. It’s about how supplements are being reimagined, rituals redesigned, and the quiet merging of performance with well-being.

Premium home coffee equipment

Recently, coffee shops have started updating their layouts to include retail sections, selling premium gear like high-end kettles and filters, a response to new specialty coffee trends that prioritize elevated at-home experiences and broader retail industry trends. It’s all part of the emerging category of middle-end coffee products: priced below the $20,000+ machines used by Blue Bottle and Starbucks but above the instant at-home coffee makers many consumers now have on their countertops.

While coffee is the world's second most-traded commodity, after oil, a growing number of consumers want a very non-commoditized experience. In fact, while coffee has been consumed for half a millennium, it wasn’t until roughly 50 years ago that the coffee world generally started to differentiate by origin or beverage type. Until then, instant and undifferentiated coffee dominated the market. Many restaurants offered free refills.

Today, specialty coffee hasn’t just taken over commercial coffee houses but also made its way into the home in the form of specialty beans, advanced grinders, special filter systems, and purified water, reflecting the broader rise of premium products in home & living trends.

Part of this category is the single-dose grinder. While most coffee grinders need to be cleaned each time the bean type is switched, single-dose grinders grind just one serving and don’t leave any residue. It helps move away from needing to set up a whole bag and finish it over the course of weeks, letting consumers more easily alternate between different flavors and setups.

From single dose grinders, to coffee pucks, the influx of specialty coffee and equipment into households has gained considerable momentum.

Precision brewing kettles

Gooseneck kettles are praised for their pour control; the long, narrow spout allows a steady, even distribution of water, which some coffee preparers say is essential for making the perfect cup. Many of them are sold as part of an electric kettle system, with down-to-the-degree temperature control—features that have gone viral as part of TikTok coffee trends showcasing precision brewing setups.

Part of the appeal of great coffee gear is risk aversion—if you don't trust your nose or your tastebuds (especially in a sleep-deprived state), you can trust a process you've paid up to get exactly right. Like sous vide machines, they’re a distinctive-looking way to do a normal food preparation activity better, and that package of appearance and output reassures the user.

One surprising sales channel for gooseneck kettles is coffee shops themselves, an echo of the growth strategy behind oat milk and dairy alternatives, one of the fastest-growing beverage trends. Blue Bottle Coffee prominently displays and sells an expensive gooseneck kettle in stores and on their site. This is a way for them to emphasize the premium quality of the experience—to get that $3 cup of coffee at home might require the Blue Bottle x Fellow Electric Kettle (almost $200); while selling the customer a gooseneck kettle is a substitute for selling them coffee, offering them an expensive kettle is a complement to the coffee.

New business models

Coffee is a massive industry: Over 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day, and Americans drink more coffee than soda, tea, and juice combined. While the coffee shop business has plenty of established players, new entrants are popping up to take advantage of new markets that larger chains won’t touch.

Scooter’s Coffee is rapidly expanding through franchising, an increasingly common trend in the restaurant industry, through a franchise model that focuses on selling coffee through kiosk-style drive-throughs that have a smaller physical footprint than a traditional store and a startup cost roughly half that of a Dunkin franchise.

Scooter's has identified a low-cost model that allows them to launch locations in places that competitors can't afford. For Scooter's, this means building smaller stores that are purely drive-through, meaning they save on both startup costs and labor. It’s an attractive deal to someone who wants a side hustle in the restaurant business but can’t afford the startup cost of a larger chain. Many companies have competed with higher-priced brands by letting their customers trade convenience and quality for price; Wish has been able to undercut Amazon on price by selling products to customers who are willing to wait for slow shipping, for example. Scooter’s uses the same approach by starting smaller stores in more out-of-the-way locations.

This means that Scooter's can enter a market too small for a Starbucks and Dunkin—and if that market grows to the point that it can support a competing chain, that chain would then be splitting the market with an incumbent, worsening its economics. That model works for stores in dense places where there's a high value to getting the quickest possible cup of coffee on the way to work. It’s important for coffee companies to be cognizant of what other companies do, because it’s a fiercely competitive market; Dunkin’ Donuts changed its name to Dunkin’ in 2018 in recognition of the fact that 60% of its revenue comes from beverages, not food.