A Funnel Cake Macchiato, Anyone? The Coffee Wars Are Heating Up.
The New York Times
From the giant Starbucks to upstarts like Scooter’s Coffee in Nebraska, the battle is joined for who can come up with the craziest, calorie-laden, not-really-coffee drink.
Six years ago, Odessa, an oil town in West Texas probably best known for the high school football team that inspired “Friday Night Lights,” had all of 17 coffee or tea restaurants.
Today, it boasts around 55.
Starbucks has eight outlets in the community, with another expected by the end of the year. A regional brand out of Arkansas, 7 Brew, has put up three drive-through coffee stands, where it serves drinks like Funnel Cake Macchiatos, Pixie Stick energy drinks and wild berry smoothies. From Oregon, the coffee companies Dutch Bros and the Human Bean have also established toeholds in the community, on top of numerous mom-and-pop coffee cafes that have also opened in recent years.
“In Texas, almost every community the same size as Odessa is seeing the same thing, an explosion in what we call the three C’s: Carwashes. Chicken places. And coffee shops,” Javier Joven, Odessa’s mayor, explained recently, a few hours after he had ordered his Starbucks usual: a venti caramel macchiato, upside down, extra hot, with soy milk.
This is not a phenomenon unique to Odessa. Across the country, in cities large and midsize, cafes and drive-ins that specialize in tea and coffee drinks make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the restaurant industry in terms of number of stores.
And it’s not just the biggest coffee chains — Starbucks and Dunkin’ — that are trying to get consumers their coffee fixes; numerous regional players are racing to expand their footprints in parts of the country like the Midwest and South, which they argue are under-caffeinated. Seven years ago, 7 Brew Coffee opened a kiosk in Rogers, Ark.; today, it has more than 190 stands stretching from Casper, Wyo., to upstate New York. Likewise, Scooter’s Coffee, a chain out of Nebraska, has grown from 170 shops in 2018 to an expected 770 by the end of this year, according to Datassential, a market research firm based in Chicago.
