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After a remodel of their original Demun location last summer included a range of price increases and menu changes that left more than a few customers in dismay, Kaldi’s Coffee announced last week via their blog that these same changes would take effect throughout all their locations during the month of February--starting with their Kirkwood location effective yesterday, February 4th. The changes are summarized below:
- A shift in focus to traditional coffee beverages in their traditional sizes
- Beverages will now be available in 8, 12, and 16oz sizes. Cold drinks only in 16oz
- No longer available: 20oz drinks--lattes, cappuccinos, and iced coffees
- 86'd as well: the $1 refill and the bottomless cup of coffee (drip coffee urns are now behind the counter)
- Emphasis on hand-brewed, pourover coffees (like Chemex and Bee House)
- Only the most popular syrups and flavors will remain: chocolate, caramel, vanilla, hazelnut, and Aztec.
- A new frozen drink menu with whole-fruit smoothies and frozen "toddys."
Kaldi’s stance is that these changes will allow their coffees to “best be enjoyed for what they are—amongst the best coffees from around the world.”
Based on the 20-some comments on Kaldi's post, reactions to the announcement are mixed—ranging from the enthusiastic adulation of coffee aficionados to outright disdain for “dumbing down” the menu.
As a coffee fanatic myself--who actually fell in love with coffee through Kaldi’s--I have been both a strong public critic and staunch supporter of what Kaldi’s has done over the years as they’ve shifted focus from being simply a local coffee roaster roasting commodity coffee beans (labeled only “Sumatra” or “Ethiopia”), to a world class roaster sourcing coffees directly from coffee farms in Africa and Central America, labeling them with country of origin, farm name, region, growing altitude, drying process, varietal and, most importantly: roasting date.
This increase in information is Third Wave Coffee at its core. Although Kaldi’s began paving the way for such a shift in the last few years as they began sourcing and roasting higher quality coffees, it cannot be overlooked that newer shops such as Half & Half in Clayton, Sump Coffee on South Jefferson, and Comet Coffee on Oakland Avenue raised the bar higher still by zeroing in on not just the quality of the roasted coffee as a product, but also the brew methods, one-size-only drink sizes, and more importantly, coffee cost.
Coined in the early 2000s and popularized throughout the decade, Third Wave Coffee is a movement in the specialty coffee industry that seeks to capitalize on the boom of coffee shop culture and coffee consumption that the popularity of chains like Starbucks created by dialing up the quality in a way a large corporation never could. Where Starbucks roasts massive amounts of coffee in a homogenous style that requires them to source equally massive amounts of the same green coffees, smaller roasters, such as Kaldi’s, can source smaller quantities of higher quality green coffee and roast them in a more exacting way to enhance each coffee’s individual characteristics.
Ironically, as the Third Wave of coffee continues, you see a sort of ping-ponging effect, where local shops and roasters look to do something Starbucks doesn’t and then, like corporations often do, Starbucks takes note and steals the idea over time. A recent example of this phenomenon happened late last year when Starbucks purchased a quantity of the prized Geisha coffee varietal as part of their expanding “reserve coffee” program and sold it in select stores for $7 per cup. Roasters like Chicago's Intelligentsia made prices like that possible for Starbucks in the same way Starbucks made the now defunct $5, 20oz latte possible for Kaldi’s.
Price increases aside, after nearly two decades in business, Kaldi’s now appears willing to walk away from what appears to be relatively easy profits (i.e., giving their customers what they want), choosing instead to forge a tougher path and educating their customers with a more iron-fisted approach that is in no way a “dumbing down” of the menu.
With these changes, Kaldi’s has returned coffee menus to where they rightfully should have been in the first place, because having to ask for a “traditional cappuccino” instead of a “cappuccino” to get a correctly sized, 6oz cappuccino seems a little silly when you put it in writing, and I’m happy I’ll never have to make that request to get what I want again.
Kaldi's new coffee menu is above; to read more about the changes, click here.
