TRENDS IN COFFEE

National Coffee Drinkers Surveys show:

A seven percent increase over 2011 in coffee consumption figures that now puts coffee at a clear, 10-point advantage over soft drinks. This finding upends what had been in the past a neck-and-neck race between the two beverages.

NCDT continues to evolve and improve in 2012. As always, this year’s study taps a random sample of U.S. adults, but for the first time, the factors that make the sample representative of the American population also include ethnicity as well as gender, age, and region. With this improvement, the cohorts of African-Americans and of Hispanic-Americans now mirror their proportions among the total population.

The 2012 edition also shows that consumer adoption of the single-cup format continues to expand. Ownership has jumped to 10% from 7% last year. Perception of the quality of coffee from single-cup systems continued to grow stronger, with 25% rating the brewers as “excellent” versus 15% who did so in 2011.