The Market That Built Specialty Is Not the Market You Are In

We are not in the same coffee market that built the specialty success stories of the 2010s

We are operating in a K-shaped economy where spending growth for middle-income households has slowed significantly, while higher-income households remain relatively insulated. This is a divergence that economists at Bank of America describe as beginning to look “more like the jaws of a crocodile.” The aspirational consumer – the person who stretches their budget for a bag of single-origin beans, who pays $7 for a pour-over because they believe in it – now increasingly shops at Costco.

In 2025, the 80th-to-95th income percentile, the wage-earning professionals who bridge the middle class and the wealthy, the hopeful HENRYs of this world (High Earners, Not Rich Yet), reduced luxury spending by roughly 35%. That cohort is specialty coffee’s core customer. And while Trevor Noah’s recent podcast guest Oliver Burkeman argues that once people get a taste of luxury, they can’t live without it (something known as loss aversion), when you have to choose between your kids’ school supplies and specialty beans, you can quickly do without the latter. That choice was once a foreign concept for the middle class. Now, it’s not uncommon – because the middle class is fast-eroding.

Why Ricardo Pereira Is Not Above a Cold Call

Many specialty players are seeking emergency capital, consumers are cutting back on eating out and premium drinks, and 2025 has marked a turning point for the sector in more ways than one. Green coffee prices are at historic highs. The Q Grader program is in flux. Consumer whims are drifting toward matcha, instant, or concentrate. The industry is not in crisis, exactly – the global numbers still look respectable on paper – but for the small and mid-sized roaster without a decade of established wholesale accounts and a loyal institutional following, the conditions for passive growth have fundamentally changed.

Which makes the “focus on the product and wait” school of thought not just unhelpful for many, but even a little dangerous for some.

Ricardo Pereira, co-founder of Age of Coffee, is not above a cold call. “Last week, I made four cold calls. And last week, I got four new wholesale clients,” he says. “I picked up the phone, did the work, and asked. It’s a great way to open up your business and have it grow in ways you couldn’t plan or anticipate.”

Ricardo has spent years in green coffee, at the highest levels of the supply chain. He is not cold calling because he lacks credibility. He is cold calling because he understands that markets don’t reward invisibility, and because the relationships he values most often begin with an unexpected first contact.

But he is not dialing blindly. “First, I create a potential client profile before even reaching out,” he says. “Once I’ve identified a match, I approach them. Knowing who you’re approaching is key.” The second thing he does is set the tone of the relationship – it’s a two-way street: “I tell them I’d love to share an idea for their business that would potentially help them grow. They need to feel that you want to add value to them.”

That is a different proposition from selling. It requires you to have done the homework and to have thought about their business before your own, so you arrive at the conversation with something to offer rather than something to ask for. It requires, in a word, humility – the very quality that is conspicuously absent from any sales philosophy built around the assumption that the right people will eventually find you. Not all cold calls are equal. You need people skills, a confident delivery, to know your stuff – but above all, you have to genuinely want that conversation, and the curiosity that goes with it. You have to care. It doesn’t have to be icky, and it doesn’t have to be cold. A cold call can be hot. Not in a romantic sense, but it might just lead to a meaningful relationship.

The Brands That Actually Expanded Specialty

That is, arguably, the deeper ethos of specialty coffee. The industry was built on relationships with producers, with buyers, with communities. It has spent years trying to shed its reputation for exclusivity and snobbery, for being a niche pleasure for a narrow crowd who already know the right words and drink the right farms. And yet some corners of the industry have developed a sales philosophy that reproduces exactly that insularity – we only work with people who already know to come to us – and dress it up as principle.

The brands that have actually expanded specialty coffee’s reach have done the opposite

Bartholomew Jones of Cxffeeblack started hosting “Coffee Cyphers” in Memphis, inviting newcomers to try and discuss African coffee while listening to rap on vinyl. He estimates that 90% of sales in the first ten days of his first product came from the Black community, a community the specialty industry had barely acknowledged existed at that point. James Freeman of Blue Bottle roasted beans in a 186-square-foot potting shed and sold coffee at farmers’ markets around San Francisco and Oakland before anyone knew what Blue Bottle was, reaching food-curious locals rather than waiting for coffee enthusiasts to discover him. Canyon Coffee grew into a seven-figure brand not through cafes, but by walking into a design store in Venice with their first bags and asking if they’d take a chance. Death Wish Coffee found its audience not at SCA but through the Super Bowl. A decision that, in their own words, “changed (their) company’s trajectory forever.”

And then there is Café Comunión. Bad Bunny personally invited the owners of the San Juan specialty coffee shop, Abner Román and Karla Ly Quiñones, to operate a mobile backstage coffee bar for his Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour, with the couple collaborating with local cafés in each tour market. Specialty coffee at stadium scale, where an audience of hundreds of thousands of people could catch a glimpse of their blue branded coffee cups each night.

Even more recently, a Kenyan specialty brand, Goode Damn Coffee, offered to send free coffee to a children’s educator, Mrs Rachel, with millions of Instagram followers – a wildly improbable target. Instead, she bought $1,000 worth and posted about it. The post received hundreds of thousands of likes. You never know, and that’s the point. You never know until you ask.