In Old Guildford, a suburb in Sydney’s west, there’s a small cafe open until midnight called Caffeine Hit. It’s a fair walk from the main strip, in a mainly residential area, with a bottle shop next door and an Arabic church across the road. It doesn’t have a flashy dining room, a fancy menu or a famous chef, but there’s often an evening queue outside. Everyone is there to get one thing: acai.
Not the health-focused, brunch acai (pronounced ah-sigh-ee) bowls of Bondi or Byron, but an oddly erect tower of acai soft serve so abundantly slathered in peanut butter, pistachio sauce or liquid Biscoff, it’s hardly recognisable as the Amazonian berry marketed as a “superfood”. It’s like eating a particularly soft, faintly berry-flavoured sorbet. If it wasn’t for its suit of liquid, nutty sweetness, it would be inoffensive and unexciting.
But the popularity of the acai soft serve isn’t just in Old Guildford. If you’re active on food TikTok or Instagram you would have seen influencers talking about their favourite acai places in Australian cities. There are frequent evening queues at Thirsty Monkey in Wentworth Point and Drp Bar (pronounced “Drip” bar) on Lygon Street in Melbourne. Meanwhile, international acai chain Oakberry has announced plans to open 30 new outlets across Australia, food trucks such as Acai Brothers are on the road (and offer franchising) in Sydney and Melbourne, and large Australian acai importers such as Amazon Power and Amazonia claim their imports are at the highest they’ve ever been.
Meanwhile, Google searches for “acai” in Australia have been rapidly increasing since May 2023, and in March this year reached an all-time high. The only comparable peak was in 2009 and 2010. So why, 15 years later, is acai’s popularity soaring?
The 2009 wave was thanks to importers such as Dwayne Martens, founder of Amazonia, who promoted the frozen berry pulp to cafes along Australia’s east coast. This led to smoothie-like acai “bowls” finding their way on to the menus of cafes, whose shopfronts would bear purple flags advertising the Amazonian berry, often with misleading health claims about its antioxidants and superfood status.
Nutrition research scientist and health writer Dr Tim Crowe says the claims are just marketing. “There simply just are not enough human clinical trials to make any definitive health claims about acai,” he says. “The term ‘superfood’ has no meaning among nutrition scientists. Pretty much all plant foods would be worthy of the title ‘superfood’.”
But acai’s resurgence isn’t due to health or diet claims. Alex Moses runs Food Inbox, a Sydney-based food and travel blog and social media account, with Kathryn Ling. Moses says acai’s branding until recently was all about health, fitness and the beach, and he wasn’t very interested. “What tastes good in protein shakes is not that tasty,” he says.
Swap an acai bowl topped with chia seeds for a soft serve drizzled with chocolate, however, and now Moses regularly orders the towering purple creations. He and Ling post about them to their 56,000 TikTok followers. Now that acai has moved away from its health food image, Ling says, “a different demographic of people have discovered it”.
Acai’s new fans are a varied bunch, and the 9pm Saturday crowd at Caffeine Hit proves that. One table has three young men – two with bumbags, one with a mullet and all with cigarettes in hand. The table next to them has young parents with two kids. Someone in a sports car revs loudly as they drive past; inside the vehicles parked around the cafe are university-aged friends, eating acai and filming themselves doing it. “It’s not just a brunch thing on the beach any more. The culture has changed,” says Moses.
According to Amazon Power founder Americo Tognetti, this culture of getting dessert-styled acai with family or friends in the evening was started in western Sydney by Middle Eastern Australian operators in 2022, spearheaded by Jacob Najjar, a prolific TikToker and the Iraqi Australian owner of Thirsty Monkey; and Caffeine Hit’s owner Bachir Houda, a Lebanese Australian. In Melbourne, Drp Bar owner Ahmed Wassel started serving acai soft serves in late 2022. “I’m Egyptian Australian; we don’t drink alcohol. It’s much more traditional to have late-night gatherings over dessert. Sydney and Melbourne both have a big Middle Eastern presence. We brought that culture [to acai] and it just blew up,” he says.
Najjar also saw an opportunity with a young generation who’d been stuck at home during Covid lockdowns, and wanted to go out – and not necessarily with a drink in hand. Survey data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows a long-term trend of 18-to-24-year-olds drinking less frequently or not at all – Najjar says most of his customers are 17 to 22.
But it’s not just gen Z who are joining the acai queues – business owners are too. When Drp Bar first served acai, it was in smoothie bowl form, with the frozen berry pulp blended with banana, honey and almond milk. “It was too much to handle, so we looked at other ways to do the acai to speed up productivity,” says Wassel. He saw operators including Najjar use a pre-blended product (operators such as Amazon Power mix their acai with water, sweeteners and stabilisers) that can be scooped out of a bucket, put in a soft serve machine and handed to a customer in under two minutes, for $10. “We picked up the trend in Melbourne … Three months after that it just blew up,” Wassel says. “TikTok really helped it kick off.”
Najjar says previously, acai was seen as a white girl food. Why would someone like him eat it, let alone make it and sell it? “But then people were seeing an Arab guy doing it, and it looks easy. People are seeing the hype and the lines and they’re thinking: can I do that? We inspired other people to do it and I love that a lot of places opened.”
Ling and Moses said the online enthusiasm can be a bit intense, with influencers battling over which place has the best acai. “As soon as a new place opens, [a lot of influencers] will go there to try it out and see if it’s better than their favourite. Everyone has their favourite, like their home team.”
What’s unclear is whether the current explosion in acai consumption will last. Will it go the route of avocado toast or the poke bowl, slowly colonising cafe menus across the country until it’s an everyday part of the Australian diet? Or will it go the way of the macaron and the slider, becoming passing fads from decades ago?
Ling and Moses speculate that many businesses will close after the hype dies, but the good operators will stick around. Moses adds: “It’s lactose-free, vegan and [gluten-free], it’s a dessert any one can eat … It’s a staple now.”
• This article was amended on 23 April 2024. Drp Bar started serving acai soft serves in late 2022, not 2023 as originally stated.
