Food & Drink Key Trends for 2021: Convenience Coffees & Cans

The Food & Drink team at WGSN released eight key trends for 2021 from among our Key Trend 2021 forecasts for special attention. These trends have been gathering strength and speed in recent months and are poised to make a big splash in 2021.

Coffee Convenience

Because many coffee lovers are still working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, innovative brands are reaching out to meet their daily needs for a jolt of joe. New convenient formats are making brewing and sipping your morning cup easier than ever. Coffee concentrates from high-quality beans allow for personalised mixing and the ultimate ease in cold and hot coffee making. Instant coffees created from globally sourced beans elevates that familiar format. How about coffee that steeps like a tea bag? Look to offerings from Steeped Coffee or even Trader Joe’s. Also available are highly engineered frozen coffee discs to dissolve in hot water and coffee-enhanced snack bars for portable pick-me-ups. No matter your coffee drinking style, there is a new convenient offering to suit.

Ones to watch: Jot Concentrate, Voilá Instant Coffee, Cometeer frozen discs, Steeped Coffee Bags, Trader Joe’s Maple Espresso Black Tea, Eat Your Coffee Bar, Nudge Coffee Butters

Canned Everything

So many beverages found their way to cans in 2020 that it created a can shortage. It’s no wonder—so many styles of drinks now come in convenient, portable and recyclable cans. Hard seltzer is part of the surge, now hugely popular in the US and expanding to the UK and beyond. The “hard” factor is also spreading—watch for more hard coffee, tea and kombucha in 2021. Canned wine is another growth item, including Just Enough which comes in a smaller can just right for one evening’s enjoyment.

The big increase is coming from canned cocktails, newly beloved with bars and restaurants mostly still closed. New styles are hitting the market regularly, coming from bartenders, still beverage companies and spirits brands. They range in alcohol level, with most lower than a typical bar drink and some at zero alcohol, fitting neatly into the still-burgeoning low/no alcohol trend.

While that’s a lot of cans, packaging companies are keeping sustainable production in mind and are looking ahead to next-generation aluminium that is produced with lower carbon footprints and new aluminium bottles to replace plastic ones.

Ones to watch: Great America Breakfast Seltzer, Allkind Hard Kombucha, Just Enough canned wines, Elenita Mezcal cocktails, Seedlip zero alcohol cans

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Alternatively, get a taste by downloading a sample of WGSN report: Food & Drink Big Ideas 2022