咖啡启示录：重塑2026年餐饮市场的六项核心策略研究报告

Table of Contents Key Takeaways:3 What Dining Chains Can Learn from Coffee's Success4 1. Winning the Whitespace: A Growth Playbook for Dining Chains5 2. Mastering the Fundamentals: Aroma Joe’s7 3. Delivering on Convenience: Scooter’s Coffee8 4. Owning the Calendar With Recurring LTOs: Starbucks and 7 Brew9 5. Moving Beyond Food & Drink: Starbucks’ Bearista Win11 6. When Pop Culture Meets Coffee: Dunkin’s Wicked Collab12 Coffee As A Playbook13 Key Takeaways: Coffee’s success in 2025 offers several key lessons for dining operators across 1.Strategic expansion into under-penetrated regions cansupercharge growth.YoY visits to coffee chains are growing fastest inareas of the Southeast and Sunbelt where the category still accounts for 2.Pairing craveable products with genuinely human, personalizedservice can build durable loyalty.Aroma Joe’s proves that whenstandout offerings are combined with warm, consistent personal 3.Prioritizing hyper-efficient convenience models can unlockmeaningful growth.Scooter’s Coffee demonstrates that fast, reliable, 4.Building recurring limited-time rituals can create predictabledemand spikes and deepen engagement.From the annual PumpkinSpice Latte launch to Jackpot Day, coffee chains show that ritualized 5.Using scarce, hype-driven offerings can generate high-impactmoments that shift behavior.Starbucks’ Bearista drop illustrates howlimited, buzzworthy merchandise or products can not only spike visits 6.Leveraging cultural collaborations can create excitement without into moments in pop culture can deliver multi-day visit lifts comparableto major promotions – often without relying on giveaways. What Dining Chains Can Learn from Coffee's Coffee has become one of the most resilient and inventive corners of the U.S.food and beverage industry. Even as consumers wrestle with higher prices andtrim discretionary spending, they continue to show up for cold foam, Throughout 2025, coffee chains saw consistent year-over-year (YoY) quarterlyvisit growth, as brands fromStarbucksto 7 Brew expanded their footprints.Crucially, per-location category-wide traffic also remained close to 2024 levels season – showing that this expansion has not diluted demand at existing What’s fueling coffee’s ongoing momentum? Which strategies are helpingleading chains accelerate despite this year’s headwinds? And what can This white paper dives into the data to reveal the strategies behind coffee’sstandout performance – and how they can help dining concepts across 1.Winning the Whitespace: A Growth Playbook Analyzing market-level (DMA) dining traffic data reveals that coffee chains areprioritizing growth in markets with lighter competition – and this formula is In the graphic below, the top map shows the share of dining visits commandedby coffee in each DMA, while the bottom map highlights the year-over-year(YoY) change in visits to the coffee category. Perhaps unsurprisingly, markets In other words, traditional coffee markets such as Northwestern metros–where competition is high and incremental gains are harder to capture – areno longer the primary engines of category momentum. Instead, coffee visitsare growing fastest across the Southeast, Sun Belt, and Texas – regions where 2.Mastering the Fundamentals: Aroma Joe’s But geography is only part of the story. And the coffee segment shows that astrong concept that delivers on fundamentals – great products and exceptional The experience of expanding Northeastern chain Aroma Joe’s shows howpairing craveable beverages with an unusually personal service model can Aroma Joe’s, a rapidly-expanding coffee chain headquartered in Maine, withover 125 locations, has become something of a local obsession: Customers raveabout the chain’s addictive signature beverages – as well as the feel-goodatmosphere cultivated by its warm, friendly staff. And this combination of The takeaway: Craveable products paired with exceptional service can create a 3.Delivering on Convenience: Scooter’s Coffee Another key differentiator for the coffee sector is convenience. Drive-thrushave becomeubiquitousacross the category, with many of the fastest-growing Scooter’s Coffee – named for its corepromiseto help customers “scoot” in andout quickly – exemplifies this advantage. In Q3 2025, the chain posted a 3.1%YoY increase in average visits per location, even as it continued to scale its By delivering consistently quick experiences without compromising quality,Scooter’s has emerged as a traffic leader in the coffee space – demonstrating 4.Owning the Calendar With Recurring LTOs: No category has mastered the “event-ization” of the menu quite like coffee– and few brands own the category’s calendar as effectively as Starbucks. Theannual return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte has become a cultural milestone that And the importance of the event only continues to grow. On August 26th, 2025,PSL day drove a 19.5% spike in traffic compared to the prior ten-week average But this p