YOU know the taste for flavoured coffee has become mega-trendy when they start giving it odd names like cinnamon roll. In fact, it is being touted as a 'mega-trend' in the United States.
According to an industry magazine Cafe Ole, gourmet coffee makes up nearly 20 per cent of all coffee sold in America, and of that 40 per cent is flavoured. Steaming cups of the drink is being sold in flavours ranging from hazelnut to orange syrup.
Such coffees were originally made from flavoured beans, but there is also a strong move to flavour coffee with the kind of syrups used in Italian sodas, granitas and milkshakes. 'You can put flavoured syrups into anything,' says Russell Frederickson, owner of the Uncle Russ chain of coffee outlets.
There are different opinions as to who the typical drinker of flavoured stuff might be. Some believe it is the person who doesn't actually like coffee, but enjoy the flavoured variety because syrups mask the bitter edge of pure coffee. Others claim the biggest market is the coffee drinker looking for a bit of variety. It's 'something fun that people can experiment with', says Donald Schoenhold of Gillies Coffee Company in Brooklyn.
In Hong Kong, however, the market is still too small to be read accurately.
'The quality coffee market is still under-developed in Hong Kong. We really need to have good coffee options before we determine how large the market is,' Frederickson says.
Coffee Central owner Judy Mertens says most patrons of her coffee-cart are 'just like a straight-up coffee, whether it is brewed, cappuccino or latte'.
