Record coffee prices push consumers home, sparking Gen Z TikTok trend

Coffee has become expensive. Not aspirational-expensive, the way a good cappuccino once was—genuinely, structurally expensive. The price of arabica beans, the high-quality variety that chains like Starbucks depend on, has more than doubled over the past twenty years. It now trades at around $3.60 a pound on New York futures, a spike driven by poor harvests in Brazil and trade tariffs that have only recently begun to ease. The result is visible on every menu: a regular cup of coffee in the United States has climbed nearly 20 percent since early 2023 alone.

But people are not giving up coffee. They are simply buying it differently. In an October survey of nearly 1,900 international coffee drinkers, Citigroup found that 37 percent have shifted toward brewing at home. The pattern holds across continents—the United States, Australia, China, Thailand, Britain all show the same movement. Among those who do not yet brew at home, roughly two-thirds expect they will within the next year. This is not a fringe response to temporary scarcity. It is a wholesale recalibration of how hundreds of millions of people consume a daily necessity.

The shift takes different forms depending on who is doing it. For some, like Ed Harrison, a managing director at a communications firm in Massachusetts, the answer was capital investment. He used to visit coffee shops six or seven times a week. Now he goes four times a month. Instead, he has bought a grinder, a drip maker, and an espresso machine for his home. The upfront cost is substantial, but the daily savings are undeniable. For others, the path is simpler: Trade Coffee, a subscription service that delivers whole beans from local roasters, has seen its customer base expand beyond the traditional aficionado market. New buyers are coming for the same reason—they value the money they save. During Black Friday in Britain this past November, sales of home coffee machines jumped 43 percent year-over-year.

For those without the time or temperament to brew at home, the market is adapting too. Cheaper alternatives are proliferating. Private-label coffee, produced by roasters but sold under a supermarket's own brand, is gaining ground as budgets tighten. Westrock Coffee, a manufacturer of private-label and ready-to-drink products with a plant in Arkansas that opened in 2024, is already running at capacity and building new production lines. Foot traffic data shows that drive-through and convenience store coffee locations across the United States are seeing growth in customer visits, some in double digits. Meanwhile, established chains like Starbucks and Tim Hortons, despite their own drive-through operations, have watched per-store visits decline from January through November compared to the year before.

What began as a practical response to inflation has become a cultural phenomenon, particularly among Gen Z. On TikTok, users are sharing techniques for recreating the coffee shop experience at home on a budget—cold brew in the refrigerator, bulk-bought plastic cups for iced lattes, milk frothed with a French press. Posts tagged #HomemadeCoffee or #CoffeeMaker have doubled over the past year. Abi Whitlock, a 27-year-old from central Illinois, reviews budget coffee options for 62,000 followers from her car. Gill Riley, a 20-year-old American studying in Barcelona, shares home-brewing tricks with her audience. What might have been a private concession to price pressure has become a shared identity, a way of signaling both financial awareness and resourcefulness.

James Hoffmann, a coffee connoisseur and YouTube influencer who co-founded Square Mile Coffee, observes that coffee shops have "lost a bit of the shine, a bit of momentum as the home market grew." Yet he remains optimistic about their survival. "I still like hanging out with people," he said, "and coffee shops remain the place to do that." The question is not whether coffee shops will endure, but what they will become. Gill Riley captures the current calculus plainly: she might visit a coffee shop more often if prices fell, but for now, making coffee at home is easier and cheaper. That trade-off, multiplied across millions of consumers worldwide, is reshaping an industry that has long taken daily foot traffic for granted.