Coca-Cola, it appears, is waking up and smelling coffee. Coke’s India subsidiary, Coca-Cola India, reports Bhanu Pande of the Times News Network, has undertaken a study examining the feasibility of a chain of coffee bars to promote its “Far Coast” line of Coffee, fruit tea, coffee grinders, and associated products.
There would, however, be a twist. Traditional coffee bars like Starbucks rely on the talent of their baristas to prepare coffee beverages to the customer’s specifications. Coke is taking a different approach.
Mary Minnick, the company’s marketing president, told a group of analysts in December 2005,”To deliver a good cup of coffee, you need a barista and a lot of average kiosks and cafes can’t afford those, so we’ve developed a cost-efficient technology that dispenses a perfect cup of coffee, perfect latte, perfect tea, every time.”
Coke’s Far Coast automatic coffee dispensers would follow their earlier forays into the ready-to-drink coffee markets dominated by Starbucks’ and PepsiCo’s Frappucino. Coke challenged them in 2001 with Planet Java, which disappeared after two years, leaving Starbucks and Pepsi with a 93% share of the market.
But Coke came back for a second round earlier this year, with the introduction of its hybrid, “Coca-Cola Blak”, a cola-flavored effervescent bottled drink infused with “coffee essences”–coffee flavored cola, with a U.S. version which has double the caffeine of regular Coke.
Coke’s movers and shakers are keenly aware of the inroads which the designer coffee industry is making in the beverage market. In 2006, for the first time since 1990, coffee consumption in the U.S has matched soda consumption. Of particular concern to the soda manufacturers is the 25-39 year-old age group, among whom coffee consumption has increased 25% in just two years.
Will coffee-flavored Coca-Cola Blak be the downfall of Frappucino and other bottled coffee beverages? Or will it simply go the way of Vanilla Coke, now being phased out of the U.S. and UK markets?
Will coffee bars with automatic, but very talented, dispensers be the downfall of coffee bars with even more talented baristas?
And, most importantly, do consumers give a hill of (coffee) beans?
