McDonald’s could have a winner on its hands with humble, straightforward coffee

McDonald’s is known for many things. A cheap and cheerful hangover cure. The kind of burger you might not Instagram, but will wolf down anyway. The saturated fat-filled nostalgia of Happy Meals. Coffee is not one of these things.

Well not yet, anyway. For it turns out caffeine addicts are the most regular customers of McDonald’s. Amid some positive results today – turnover increased by £19m while operating profits rose £343m – it revealed a surprising fact. “Coffee drinkers are our most frequent customers,” it said. “To keep pace with changing expectations, we have been trialling barista-made coffee, served quickly at an affordable price.”

This doesn’t come as a total shock. McDonald’s has long been promoting the speed and affordability of its brews. Alongside that, it’s taken a healthy swipe at the pretentiousness of the coffee world. Its most recent ad aimed to demystify the flat white. (Unlike snooty baristas, a helpful McDonald’s worker is happy to clear things up: “It’s like a stronger latte, just with less milk.”)

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It’s clearly positioned as an antidote to the double shot, extra hot, soy milk latte culture. This is simple, no-frills coffee for people who don’t do all that llama milk macchiato nonsense.

There is clearly a market for this kind of coffee, if the ambitions of the most famous no-frills airline is anything to go by. EasyJet’s beverage venture, EasyCoffee, has plans to open 100 more stores in the next three years. Although it’s still small fry – there are currently a grand total of eight EasyCoffee stores in the UK – the growth plans compare favourably with the rest of the market.

For in the world of double shot, extra hot, soy milk lattes, the stellar growth once seen by the large coffee chains is now slowing down. Like-for-like Costa sales fell for the first time in January, only offset by the opening of a handful of new stores. Starbucks is suffering from a slowdown in most of its mature markets.

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On the other hand, coffee experts believe there is some impressive growth to be had among what it deems “non-specialists” – i.e. the likes of McDonald’s. Allegra, organiser of the London Coffee Festival, says many consumers appreciate the “easy accessibility, fast service and low price” of fast food coffee. (Although it’s more likely to be a coffee-to-go rather than a leisurely latte due to the noisy nature of a McDonald’s versus your standard Starbucks.)

It’s unlikely shoppers will ever see McDonald’s coffee as a treat or an indulgence. But it’s easy to see how its simple menu and fast turnaround times could make serious inroads into the caffeine-deprived commuter market, for starters.

So it may be time to ditch the decaf, extra hot, flat white with coconut. And time to embrace the “stronger latte with less milk”.