McDonald’s says cappuccino is still Australia’s favourite coffee, flat white ‘peaked’ in 2012

SORRY, hipsters. Australia’s biggest cafe has revealed our favourite drink, and it’s probably not what coffee snobs would expect.

THE ’90s are calling — they want their coffee back.

After more than two decades the humble cappuccino is still Australia’s favourite coffee, according to the country’s biggest coffee chain, while the Kiwi-imported flat white “peaked” in popularity in 2012.

To mark the 25th birthday of McCafe, which opened its first location in Melbourne in 1993, McDonald’s has dug into its data to reveal the cappuccino has remained a longstanding favourite.

“People just love a cappuccino,” said McDonald’s Australia marketing director Jo Feeney. “If we look back five, 10, 20 years, it’s really consistent in terms of the cappuccinno being about half of the coffee we serve. Given we’re the biggest provider of coffee in Australia, that’s probably a number that would be representative.”

Last year, 43 per cent of all coffees served at McDonald’s restaurants and drive-throughs were cappuccinos, 27 per cent were lattes and just 19 per cent were flat whites.

The cappuccino’s popularity was highest in Tasmania and NSW on 48 per cent and 47 per cent respectively, while the chocolate-dusted drink was least popular in Victoria, where it accounted for 39 per cent of coffees.

McDonald’s said the latte had soared in popularity over the past decade, increasing by 21 per cent, and was most popular in Victoria where it made up 38 per cent of coffees sold. The flat white was most popular in WA on 32 per cent, compared with just 11 per cent in Victoria.

Ms Feeney said the cappuccino was popular with “more everyday Australians”. “There’s something about the word ‘cappuccino’ that makes it feel a little bit more Italian, a bit more fancy,” she said.

She added the fact that most of the chain’s promotional material featured either cappuccinos or lattes could also be a factor.

“Interestingly, espresso and long black are not huge at McDonald’s, but in fact Queensland actually has the higher uptake of black coffee choices [at 4 per cent of orders], which I was intrigued by, thinking that might have been more a Melbourne or Sydney thing.”

Ms Feeney said convenience was one of the biggest drivers of the Australian coffee scene, with the launch McCafe through McDonald’s drive-through in 2014 tapping into that trend.

“That’s been hugely successful, it probably was the biggest thing we ever did in terms of shifting the dial for us in coffee sales,” she said, adding that a large amount of testing was needed to ensure it didn’t slow down drive-throughs.

“Obviously speed is critical. We actually found we need to occasionally park someone through the drive-through so we didn’t affect our other customers, but the majority [of the time] we haven’t had any effect in terms of our speed.”

Over the last 12 months McDonald’s has rolled out “barista academies” to properly train all of its McCafe staff, and Ms Feeney said over the next year the chain would test new blends and trial variants like cold drip coffee.

“We will always continue to innovate in the right space for what our customers are after,” she said. “We’ll never be the complete hipster coffee but we certainly want to stay on the edge of what our customers want.”

Ms Feeney said McDonald’s served 1.2 million customers per day, about 12 per cent of whom order coffee, and that over an eight-week period the company would go through around 14 million coffee cups. That work out to somewhere between 144,000 and 250,000 cups of coffee per day.

According 2015 figures from market research firm Euromonitor, McCafe is the biggest cafe chain by value with 22.1 per cent of the market, with Coffee Club on 20.9 per cent, Gloria Jean’s on 14.5 per cent and Michel’s Patisserie on 8.9 per cent.

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Originally published as McDonald’s says cappuccino is still Australia’s favourite coffee, flat white ‘peaked’ in 2012