£5 lattes and the thing most coffee businesses overlook.

Did you see this piece from the BBC about coffee prices a couple of weeks ago?

The £5 coffee that tells a story of global economic turmoil

Just looking at that title, you might be groaning and thinking “Great.. more doom and gloom about the economy.” but there’s actually a lot more to this story, and I found it truly fascinating when I started applying it to 92 Degrees.

Basically, it’s an article written by good, old Faisal Islam, the BBC’s economics editor. He spent some time tracing the journey of a single cup of coffee – from Vietnamese farms and Brazilian frosts to Houthi-disrupted shipping routes and Trump’s tariff belt – and discovered exactly why the cost of a cup of coffee is already exceeding £5 in many areas.

It’s a full-on piece covering climate shock, geopolitical chaos, and supply disruption. The list of pressures on the coffee industry right now is, frankly, quite something.

Yet, people haven’t stopped buying coffee. The BBC talks about “inelastic demand”, and what that means in plain English is that however much the price of a cup goes up, people keep buying them. They grumble, and then they get in the queue anyway.

How many other industries would be struggling to keep customers coming in under these kinds of pressures, but that just doesn’t happen to coffee. It’s a part of our lives and culture now in a way that price shocks like this simply won’t touch.

The 92 Degrees franchise keeps ahead of the game by serving some Damn Fine Coffee™, of course, but I think it goes a lot deeper than that.

It’s not just about the coffee any more.

Yes, a great product is always going to be at the heart of any business’ success, but I think that product isn’t just the coffee. What people are actually paying for is the experience of being somewhere they want to be. The chains that are finding it tough tend to be the ones that never really understood that – the ones where the coffee arrives quickly and correctly and you’ve forgotten the place before you’ve reached the street.

Walk into a 92 Degrees coffee shop and it feels different.

People aren’t just popping in for a coffee. They’re going somewhere they actually like. The shops have their own character and they look like the areas they’re in, not like every other coffee shop on the high street. The staff know the regulars. There’s a reason people sit there longer than they planned to, and come back the next day, and bring someone with them.

That wasn’t something that developed gradually. It was the point from the beginning. When 92 Degrees opened its first shop in Liverpool, the thinking wasn’t “let’s make great coffee and see what happens.” It was “let’s build somewhere people genuinely want to be, and make sure the coffee is exceptional too.” Eleven years later, that’s still what every shop is built around.

The demand for coffee isn’t going anywhere – the BBC piece makes that pretty clear – but the demand for somewhere worth going? That’s just as strong, and a lot harder to replicate. The big chains can try, but you can’t manufacture the feeling that a place belongs to its neighbourhood. You either build it that way from the start, or you don’t have it at all.

92 Degrees builds it that way. Every time.

If you’d like to talk about what a 92 Degrees franchise could look like for you, the Schedule Call button below is the place to start.