Toast is a point-of-sale system used to manage transactions, primarily at retail locations like coffee shops and restaurants. In the US alone, over 160,000 food and beverage businesses use the platform, giving them a rather large data pool from which to discern year-over-year consumer trends. Which is exactly what they have done for coffee. In the latest coffee edition of their Restaurant Trends Report, Toast examines what drinks are rising in popularity, and what drinks are falling, as told by consumer data.
Released Thursday, March 12th, the data pulls from Toast transactions between January 2024 and December 2025 from American restaurants and coffee shops to determine the state of caffeinated beverages heading into 2026. It should be noted that this report includes both coffee shops and restaurants, so the findings shouldn’t necessarily be treated as coffee shop-specific.
The biggest dips in sales from 2024 to 2025, as they relate to traditional coffee shop beverages include: green tea (-4.9%), black tea (-3.4%), drip coffee (-3.3%), and cold brew (-2.2%). Meanwhile drinks like lattes, espressos, and Americanos all saw an overall increase, of 4%, 3.3%, and 1.4%, respectively.
Smaller espresso-based beverages saw modest movement. Cappuccinos lost .4% while macchiatos gained .6%.
Non-coffee caffeine options like energy drinks and diet sodas saw the largest growth, increasing 8.7% and 7.4%, respectively, year over year. Non-caffeinated tisanes jumped by 8.6% as well.
One potential explanation for the shift in coffee purchasing points less to what folks are drinking but where. All the drinks that lost market share—black and green tea, drip coffee, and cold brew—are all easily made at home, whereas the espresso-based drinks, which require more—and more expensive—equipment may be helping to maintain retail’s stronghold on the category. The trend toward making coffee at home could also be bolstered by market uncertainty, particularly stemming from price increases due to tariffs.
It is difficult to divine too much from the data; the world at large is in flux across a million different axes, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint any single driving force behind the changes. But as more years are added, the trends, should any exist, will become clearer.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
