The Hidden Cost Of Customized Coffee Orders

These days, it feels like, if you haven't tried a strawberry matcha latte with a black sesame cream top or hacked the Starbucks ordering to get a nitro cold brew with 4 espresso shots and 10 pumps of vanilla, you're doing coffee wrong. The pressure to allow the customer to order whatever they want is causing your local coffee shop to come up with viral-worthy coffee drinks with cold foams and on-trend flavoring ingredients. Let's not forget the beautiful colors that don't get mixed by the barista, so the marbling of the different colors catches the eye. All of this has left the most important part of a coffee drink by the wayside – the coffee.

A recent survey from a U.K. coffee company, Lincoln & York, found that 75% of coffee consumers aged 18-34 add flavored syrup to their coffee. This growing attention to the additions is lessening the importance of the coffee and coffee producers with their many ways of processing the beans. The past few years of the current specialty coffee boom, focusing on the quality of single origins, have increased prices for high-quality beans, offering the farmers in an industry struggling with poverty at the foundational growers' level a chance at a stable, higher income for less product. 

The Starbucks secret menu is powerful if you know how to use it right. On Reddit, Starbucks employees love to talk about the wildest customization orders they've seen.  Reading their experiences makes you wonder if we'd be better served by just trusting the professionals and drinking what they've worked hard to come up with that highlights the actual coffee.

One employee reports a daily regular ordering "18 shots of espresso with 50 pumps white mocha in a personal cup." Another confusing order was "Venti Iced mocha no ice no milk 16 pumps of mocha and 16 shots no whip." It seems like it should be clear, but apparently, people have different ideas of what an iced coffee is.

Perhaps the wildest customized orders involve water and no coffee.  One employee reported an order of "a grade iced water ... with whipped cream and mocha drizzle." Another once received a customized order of "a cup of water with half and half." As one commenter put it, "I wonder if their stomachs hurt after orders like this."

We understand if all this makes you want to go back to basics. The most essential part of coffee is the coffee itself, which comes from the bean, so we recommend you start with our guide to the wide world of coffee beans as a reset.