Hello! This is a dispatch from suburban Michigan where I grew up. I am swinging through to see my parents after speaking at Philly Chef’s Conference earlier this week (and checking in on many of my favorite Philly restaurants including Pizzeria Beddia and adding new spots to that list, namely, My Loup and Paffuto).
My hometown isn’t one of those cute little towns with lots of small and quaint mom and pop businesses. Instead, it is the land of generic chains for every category: restaurants, grocery stores, clothing stores, electronics, coffee, etc. (The one real exception is the local bookstore, my favorite place, and where you will most frequently find me.) It means I spend a lot of time at Target (one of my favorite grocery stores!), wandering the aisles, and catching up on the sheer number of SKUs in the store. I was surprised, the other day, to find not one but eight, refrigeration cases dedicated to, and brimming with… coffee creamer? (Took a little video, see below!)
There’s the standard offerings like giant jugs of coffee mate in flavors like caramel, vanilla, and hazelnut. Then there was the glut of totally novel flavors: toasted marshmallow, chocolate covered strawberry, cookie dough, oatmeal cookie, coffee cake, just to name a few. A lot of them brag about being made with real cream or milk (a number of brands have gotten backlash for essentially being sugar mixed with vegetable oil.) What is most fascinating about this selection is just how much coffee creamer these days is non-dairy and made with alternative milks like coconut and almond. I would argue that the majority of the options were dairy-free.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that so much real estate at Target. The coffee creamer market (both dairy and non-dairy) in the U.S. alone is set to grow by 2.51 billion dollars by 2025. Even more wild perhaps is that the global non-diary creamer market is going to be a 2.3 billion dollar industry globally by 2028, according to market research.
It’s easy to write off any trend these days as “thanks to TikTok.” But I find that to be such a boring and overwrought answer that doesn’t actually investigate why something might find footing on TikTok. It also doesn’t take into account how long product development actually takes — which is generally several months to several years — nor production time to not only make these new and novel coffee creamers, but to also secure space on grocery shelves for them. Attributing everything to TikTok also doesn’t really account for scale, and how much real estate Target is willing to give a singular category of product. These decisions usually takes months, if not years, plus mountains of data.
This is not to say that TikTok doesn’t have any impact whatsoever. The rising popularity of “Dirty Sodas” or adding coffee creamer to sodas, a very Utah thing thanks to the Mormon population that does not drink alcohol or coffee but still wants a novelty beverage, has definitely help push the demand for coffee creamers. Same with CoffeeTok in general, where people make cute, aesthetically pleasing drinks in their own homes. Part of me also wonders if this is the at-home continuation of the Starbucks Effect, which made it so common place, and so easy, to order highly customizable coffee drinks. Ultimately, I think the internet’s perpetual need for new has definitely lead to the rise in more and more novelty options in several categories, not just coffee creamers.
Someone who says they used to work as a buyer for Target slid into my DMs and offered an alternative theory that was interesting, which is that stores have a certain amount of fridge real estate generally that they need to fill. The space already exists, so why not fill it with non-dairy coffee creamers, which have an incredibly long shelf-life.
I really abhor defining trends by generations, but it does seem that millennials came into coffee drinking age in the midst of the Third Wave of coffee, where sourcing the highest quality bean and roasting it to perfection, all in pursuit of the perfect cup of black coffee was the name of the game. I personally love the occasional novelty coffee, so the movement away from this, and the acceptance that yes, some milk in coffee does taste great and is not a mortal sin, has been a relief. But I do wondering if Gen Z is taking this too far. It’s fine if it doesn’t matter to you if your coffee is from single origin beans from Kenya, but at a certain point, when you add enough novelty creamers and cold foams and other flavored whips, when does coffee stop being coffee?
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Have you tried any of these coffee creamers? Please let me know in the comments! The Chobani brand ones in particular have great packaging and seem to be the most popular among the TikTok set. I have yet to try them, but after having thought about cookie dough-flavored coffee creamer for the past 72 hours, I would be lying if I didn’t say I would be curious to try it… at least once.
Some Life Updates!
Writing: My first piece for the LA Times was published yesterday. I wrote about Harucake, this charming as hell bakery and cake shop in Koreatown that makes the best version of one of my favorite trends: Korean Minimalist Cakes.I also have a little piece out in the April issue of Food & Wine about Selz Limone e Sale, the most refreshing drink ever that is a speciality of Sicily.
Cookbook: If you haven’t pre-ordered yet, please do. There is a fun pre-order incentive that I will be announcing next week, too.The book officially comes out June 4!
Tour: I am also in the midst of planning a very robust cookbook tour, which I am dubbing The United States of Amrikan book tour. I will be doing Indian Pizza Parties in most every city! Please reach out if you’d like to see an event in your city or know of a company that would like to bring me in to do a talk (I have a lot of things I can talk about!)
Cooking: I was recently sent a bottle of oil from the Algae Cooking Club and I have to admit that I am quite impressed. A lot of Indian cooking calls for neutral oil, especially if you aren’t using ghee, and I am not really a fan of canola or vegetable oil (nor their health implications). I appreciate that this oil has a truly neutral flavor a high smoke point. The bottle is also chic and is recyclable, too.
