Cold Brew Coffee: A Long-Term Trend or New Thing For Indonesians?

Coffee is the most popular beverages in the world for years that it has became a daily lifestyle for many people. From time to time, various kinds of coffee with unique flavors are produced and make this business keeps growing. We can see it from the sales of cold brew coffee for example.

Being popular for more than ten years ago in several countries like U.S. for instance, cold brew coffee sales started increased rapidly since 2012 [1], and it even became a top five delivery item during pandemic in 2020, which is growing 206% over the year prior according to Grubhub’s Year in Food Report [2]. On May 2022, Finleys even reported that in Europe, consumption of cold brew coffee has increased by 40% over the last five years, which makes it possible to lead the next global wave of coffee culture [3].

However, being one of many countries with a large number of coffee enthusiast which has total coffee production reaching until 774.60 thousand tons in 2021 [4] and keep increasing up to 50% for these last 3-4 years [5], the popularity of cold brew coffee is still something quite new in Indonesia. Therefore in July – August 2022, Snapcart conducted two studies with 5.222 and 5.000 samples about Indonesians’ familiarity and interest toward cold brew coffee.

From the infographic above we can see that 64% Indonesians are familiar with cold brew coffee yet interestingly, we also found out that only 20% who really understand about this coffee, like by how it was made for example (by soaking it in cold water and stored it in the refrigerator for 8-24 hours). But despite the lack of knowledge about cold brew coffee, our survey figured out that more than half population (51%) have tried drinking this coffee, which is dominated by people aged 35-45 years old (55%).

Moreover, unlike some previous trending beverages that were being popular for a few months, 96% who have tasted cold brew coffee confessed that they are still interested to consume cold brew coffee in the future, so we can assume that this beverage would stay here in a quite long period of time.

Does the Price Really Matter?

If a lot of consumers usually buy something because of the cheap price, but different thing happens toward Indonesian coffee enthusiasts. Our survey found out that the most popular reason why people interested to try drinking cold brew coffee is because of its unique taste, while only 11% who confessed that the affordable price is the reason why they try to buy this kind of coffee for the first time.

Furthermore, most people (54% male and 55% female) prefer to buy cold brew coffee that made by barista at coffee shop, rather than the ‘ready to drink’ one that is packaged in a bottle, which is usually sold at a cheaper price.

However ironically, our respondents also confessed that most of them (38%) would definitely buy cold brew coffee at price Rp 8.000-Rp 10.000. We can see the detail of this interesting fact from the data below that based on the consumers’ economic class (SES).