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A viral coffee drink created by a little college town coffee shop on the outskirts of Minneapolis is now making its way around the world after its inventors decided to give the recipe away for free.
After Little Joy Coffee’s raspberry danish latte, a spring seasonal drink, went viral in March, the shop’s owners decided to encourage coffee shops to rip off the recipe directly and add it to their menus.
Posting both a home recipe and step-by-step instructions for coffee shops, they asked shops if they wanted to be added to a map of places that will serve the raspberry danish latte. Hundreds of shops quickly signed up. A map of the shops shows a presence on every continent except Antarctica, with pins in dozens of countries. The map has nearly 2m views.
Baristas from the shop recently tasted the raspberry danish latte their shop invented while on vacation in Dublin, Ireland – a sign of just how far the latte had traveled.
The idea came from the shop’s video series, “DIY or buy,” showing people how their recipes were made and how much the ingredients cost. As Americans (and everyone else) struggle with affordability, the videos aim to give people a more realistic idea of what it costs to serve up their favorite beverages.
Little Joy Coffee’s raspberry danish latte costs $8 and is made up of a house-made raspberry syrup sitting at the bottom, followed by milk and a double shot of espresso. A vanilla cream cheese foam floats at the top, completed with two raspberries on a skewer. The cost to DIY? About $2.46, the shop estimated, not including the labor costs or any needed tools.
“The verdict is in: don’t make this one at home,” store manager Serena Walker said in the video.
The shop, set in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, with a population of about 20,000 and a town slogan of “cows, colleges, community”, knew most of the people who saw the video wouldn’t be able to visit in person and try it.
“But this brings us to a flaw in the whole ‘DIY or buy’ premise: How are you supposed to buy this if you live 1,000 miles away? Which is why we’re inviting any coffee shop to steal this drink and put it on their own menu. Not you, Starbucks,” Walker said.
Cody Larson, the owner of Little Joy Coffee, came up with the idea after recognizing that most of the shop’s 132,000+ followers on Instagram wouldn’t come to Northfield, an exurb about 45 minutes south of Minneapolis. The shop has been open since 2019, and it was a coffee cart for several years before that.
“I was like, nah, that won’t work because nobody’s gonna actually put it on their menu. I even wrote in my notes app, pros and cons of doing this. The con was, we would look like losers, because nobody would put it on their menu.”
Small coffee shops see each other less as competition, more as collaborators, Larson said. The competition is the big chains. Small shops are usually all friendly with each other. Sharing the recipe was an extension of that.
“I think just giving permission was really cool for a lot of shops that were watching from afar, and like, oh, that’d be cool to have on our menu, but I don’t want to be like a copycat,” Larson said. “It doesn’t hurt us any if a coffee shop in California has the same drink as us. We’re not worried about that.”
Little Joy doesn’t vet the coffee shops that sign up, so people should reach out to the shops to make sure they have the latte on their menu. And there’s no way to vet how another shop makes the drink. Larson said people will email to say they swapped out certain ingredients and made adjustments, almost looking for his approval, but it’s all out of his hands now.
“I assume we’re not gonna catch any bad reviews from a drink at a different shop,” he said. “I think people understand, it’s from shop to shop, there’s gonna be differences, even if the drink has the same name.”
The raspberry danish latte wasn’t a fixture of the Little Joy menu. It was a special spring seasonal drink, and it won’t stay on the menu past the spring, either. In the short time it’s been on the menu, it has become the shop’s top seller, beating out a standard plain latte.
It was inspired by – no surprise here – a raspberry danish. The raspberry syrup is like the raspberry filling of the pastry, the cream cheese foam like a pastry cream.
Specialty menus focused on seasonal draws have become a feature at many small coffee shops. At Little Joy, they’ve noticed in the last year that drinks with more unexpected or trendier ingredients, like yuzu, weren’t selling well anymore, perhaps a reflection of the cost of a specialty latte during a time when people struggle with increased costs of other goods.
The “DIY or buy” series gives people the option to make a signature drink at home, but it also shows them the costs that go into an $8 latte, Walker said.
“People are like, coffee is so expensive now at small shops, it costs $8,” she said. “But when you really break it down, you see how little profit we’re actually making off of this, because the ingredients, the labor to make it, the labor to have people give it to you, to have the lights on and everything kind of just gets perspective.”
Drinks tied to familiar desserts have drawn in customers. A carrot cake latte “went absolutely crazy”, Larson said. He’s inspired by mixology and cocktail culture – one recipe, for a cardamom bun latte, used a fat washing technique used by mixologists to create the syrup. He tried various attempts at a mango sticky rice latte before landing on the raspberry danish.
People commenting on the shop’s videos would often say they wished they lived near Little Joy so they could come and try the drinks. There are sometimes detractors, like people who say the raspberry danish latte isn’t that original and didn’t deserve the hype.
“To me, that’s the equivalent of the person in the Museum of Modern Art or something, looking at the abstract painting like, I could have done that. Well, you didn’t,” Larson said. “And we did put a lot of work in, just figuring out the right ratios.”
In person, the shop serves townies and college professors mostly in the morning, then sees student traffic from the two private colleges in Northfield in the afternoons. After the viral recipe, people have driven from hours away to try the drink in person, Walker said. It’s often people visiting family, but sometimes it’s just for Little Joy.
“Sometimes, I’ll check the Instagram later and see that somebody tagged us in a story, and they’re like, I drove two hours to be here, and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I served them. That’s so scary. It’s a lot of pressure,” Walker said.
Larson is still surprised at how far the latte has spread and brainstorming ways to follow up. The shop will probably create another recipe for other places to rip off with permission, but not too often – he wants to be sure it’s something that people will buy, where the recipe works well. But Little Joy now has a lot of other coffee shops following it online, so maybe there are other ways to share education.
“I still don’t understand how it went so far,” he said. “And, I’m just thinking, okay, what’s next? Not like how do we outdo this or anything, just like, okay, what do we do with this new following?”
