The Next "Barista Milk"

it's not what you expect

If you’re a coffee snob you’re most likely familiar with the term “barista milk” which rose in popularity during the Millennial hipster era of the early 2010s, as whole milk was not considered as good for latte art, and thus, the barista blend was created to have higher portein and fat consistency.

By mid 2010s, as plant based milks became more popular, Oatly leveraged this need for “barista blend” and introduced their own barista edition in 2016, this made it easier for coffee shops to adopt plant based milks and would become their hero product shortly after. Now that we’re halfway in 2020s, barista milk has widespread adoption, not just in coffee shops and national chains like Starbuckss but it’s made it into our grocery stores as well—but as GenZ and Alpha grow into caffeinated consumption, we’re able to glimpse what will become the new coffee shop sensation, and though we’ve written about it previously, we’ve just come across a few new launches that inspired this piece.

Matcha milk is the new barista blend.

If you’ve been here long enough you know that my growing theory that Americans are not really into the taste of coffee, or matcha, but they are enamoured with colorful drinks, and being able to cosplay “taste” both in the literal and discernment sense, in the same way ordering a latte was a form to signal for our generation, ordering a cold matcha drink with banana foam or ube does the same for GenZ. Brands are taking notice with Minor Figures recently debuting their oat matcha in UK, and Oatly and Oatside doing this in Asia.

What’s next? I have another theory we will start to see “coconut matcha” blends.