Every year, the way consumers enjoy coffee and interact with UK coffee chains continues to shift as different priorities emerge. New trends are taking shape, giving insightful coffee shops the opportunity to shine above the rest.
While the coffee shop industry is not without its challenges, as always, there are plenty of exciting trends for UK coffee shops to embrace over the next few months! We share our top trend predictions for 2025 to help you stay ahead.
Smart Coffee Shop Marketing
Good coffee is pretty easy to find these days, so coffee shops must make their mark and start marketing themselves smarter than before—and continue providing excellent coffee, of course!
This includes marketing towards younger audiences who are often responsible for spreading trends around the internet. Utilising digital tools to find out what your customers want and how you can best deliver it is one of the best ways to market your coffee shop in 2025.
Effective branding and customer convenience are essential when moving your brand online. Cultivating an online presence is now virtually inescapable if you want to create a complete modern coffee shop experience.
The Coffee Shop Aesthetic
Over the last couple of years, the importance of interior design in coffee shops has grown rapidly. Although great-tasting coffee is extremely important, the impact of appealing, aesthetic interiors cannot be overstated. Not only is it about an aesthetic interior looking welcoming and inviting to customers, but also how it makes them feel during their coffee shop experience.
Looking back at the first point on coffee shop marketing, creating a beautiful environment can encourage customers to take pictures and share your coffee shop online, creating that hugely important word of mouth.
Think about how the space is laid out, lit, furnished and decorated. This will help to improve and contribute to your customers' feelings whilst enjoying the perfect cup of coffee. Designers can help to create a space that will resonate at a high level with your customers, understanding how they’ll respond intuitively to colours, materials, light levels and noise levels.
Having a well-thought-out interior will positively impact your store and improve the whole customer experience. A welcoming space will encourage customers not just to visit for their occasional coffee but to frequent your store for reading, work, studying and more.
Community Focuses
For an increasing number of us, ensuring we’re supporting local coffee businesses can be an important deciding factor when choosing where to buy our coffee.
Local coffee shops have historically been social hubs for the community; we will see a continued trend towards more people investing in local communities, especially as working from coffee shops and booking out spaces remains popular.
Sustainable Coffee & Conscious Consumers
The public conversation around sustainability in coffee shops is no longer confined to the importance of using reusable coffee cups and recycling coffee grinds – although these things are still vital to helping us leave the world in a better place.
More people are aware of the dramatic changes to the climate, how this affects coffee farms and how coffee farming can become more sustainable and fair for the farmers. This is leading to a rise in consumers deciding where to get their coffee based on a shop's sustainability practices, and many coffee shops are responding by upping their environmental efforts.
Transparency, along with sustainability, is becoming somewhat of a buzzword in the coffee industry. Customers want to know more about the journey of the coffee bean, along with the efforts that coffee shops are making to increase environmentally friendly practices.
More Milk Alternatives
Milk alternatives have been around for years, and due to the exponential growth of alternative milk drinkers for reasons including sustainability, far more options are now readily available.
Over the past couple of years, oat milk has emerged as the non-dairy milk of choice in the UK. We expect this preference isn’t going away anytime soon but, with some newcomers on the market, there are plenty of milk alternatives to rival oat milk in the years to come.
One particular alternative to keep an eye on is potato milk. While it sounds a little odd, drinkers of this plant-based milk swear by it – don't worry, it doesn’t taste like potatoes! Potatoes use around half the amount of land it takes to grow the number of oats you would need for the equivalent milk, so climate-conscious consumers may be more than convinced.
Better Tea Options
Although the UK is known for its reputation as a tea-drinking nation, according to a report from World Coffee Portal’s Cakes, Shakes & Tea Brakes study, 37% of UK consumers perceive tea served in coffee shops as poor value for money and not promoted well.
Selling and promoting a healthy range of teas including matcha, turmeric, and green tea could help tea sales turn over a new leaf. These teas have grown in popularity over the last couple of years, as more and more people are choosing to drink the healthier option, not to mention drinking matcha has become the talk of the town recently.
Promoting a range of traditional and healthier teas will help entice new people to go to your coffee shop, making it part of more customers' daily routines.
It's not just teas, either. There's a growing trend among younger generations towards healthy food and drinks both at home and out in town. Consider promoting the health benefits of different products on offer and including tasty caffeine-free options so people more mindful towards personal wellness become repeat customers.
Game-ifying the Coffee Experience
One of the buzzwords of the last few years has been gamification, and with technology and AI becoming an increasing part of everyday life, this trend is unlikely to slow down.
Gamification for the food and drinks sector often revolves around creating engaging online experiences through things like applications, online menus, and perks such as repeat purchase stamps. Greeting customers with a positive online experience that compliments the in-store experience can make them more comfortable and likely to spend time with your coffee shop.
If you're looking for something a little different to the usual stamp card, you could consider a coffee subscription. Subscription boxes have seen a steady rise over the last few years thanks to in-person shopping limitations and the availability of more online options. This is no different with the coffee industry.
Coffee drinkers enjoy drinking quality coffee at home, and many coffee shops have taken advantage of this with personalised subscription boxes and coffee deliveries. The coffee subscription box trend caters to customers’ increased interest in quality at-home coffee experiences and is an easy way for more people to get into artisan coffees.
Embracing some of these trends and keeping an eye on what’s to come helps ensure that your coffee shop is adaptable and always changing with the market!
As a well-loved community hotspot, a coffee franchise offers a brilliant opportunity to start a thriving business. So, have you got what it takes to become an Esquires Coffee franchise partner? Head over to our coffee franchise FAQs to find out more, or apply today.
About the author - Jack Anderson
Jack has been working in the franchise sector for over 12 years and is our in-house guru on all things business! Jack is also a keen hiker and can be found in some of the UK's best walking spots on the weekends.
