The Dirt on Flavored Coffee
“Well that’s just not possible.” - Every single coffee factory when Copper Cow Coffee founder, Debbie, told them she wanted to put real spices like cinnamon and vanilla into her coffee instead of flavoring them artificially.
After years of relentless commitment to mastering the perfect Classic Vietnamese coffee, we were in search of what was next. And what we learned in the process changed the whole course of Copper Cow.
Debbie, the founder and CEO of Copper Cow, wasn’t a fan of the standard flavored coffees she’d had before, but one of Copper Cow’s interns at the time often rolled into work fashionably late with a lavender latte from the local coffee shop in hand.
At first, we teased her for it - until we tried the lattes for ourselves. The cafe made their lavender simple syrup with real lavender flowers, and it was aromatic, but without the overly sweet or artificial taste. We were hooked.
Flowers > flavors
We started experimenting with putting dried lavender flowers and other herbs and spices into the coffee before brewing. At the time, we were offering DIY pour over coffee bars at the offices of a few big tech companies. We'd have our classic coffees and creamers, and then bring different herbs and spices they could add themselves: lavender, cinnamon, rose petals, mocha powder. and we immediately knew we were onto something.
People were soooo excited about it, they couldn't believe how good it tasted and loved getting creative with our add-ins. But they were also really intimidated by knowing how much to put in the coffee. Sometimes Debbie would watch in horror as someone would add more lavender than coffee to their filter. And the light bulb went off in her mind: “Is there a way I could just pre-portion it already in the bag before you open it?”
And the obsession over how to actually manufacture a lavender latte – with flowers, not flavorings – began.
The not-so-tasty truth about traditional “flavored” coffee
As Debbie began her quest to find the right partners to help bring our flavored coffee dreams to life, she was shut down pretty quickly. No one was willing to make coffee the way we wanted. In fact, no one even knew how, because no other coffee companies were doing it.
The stark flavor difference between the DIY lavender pour overs and the flavored coffees Debbie had tried in the past got her wondering - why did the hazelnut coffee from Trader Joe’s or a vanilla latte from Starbucks taste so…not like actual hazelnuts or vanilla beans?
She found out that most flavored coffees were actually just low quality beans sprayed with flavored “essences” or artificial blends of chemicals to mask the taste.
You’ve probably seen “natural flavors” on the ingredient list for a food, drink, or flavored coffee, and you may have even thought “well that’s better than artificial flavors.” They’re so popular that they’re actually the fourth most common ingredient on food labels!
So if the flavoring is so natural, why don’t they just list out the actual ingredients?
The FDA says a natural flavoring is “an essential oil or extract from a plant or animal source.” Sounds pretty good, right? In reality, this term can be a misleading way for companies to hide a bunch of not-so-natural ingredients.
Turning something directly from nature, like a lavender flower, into a concentrated flavor essence, requires heat and/or chemical enzymes. And according to the Environmental Working Group , these flavor mixtures can actually be 80-90% chemicals and “incidental additives” like solvents, emulsifiers, flavor enhancers, and preservatives.
How can they call that natural?
Some natural flavors have up to 100 ingredients in them - a far cry from nature, and often more ingredients than you’d find in an artificial flavor. So how can they be labeled as natural? Well, the word “natural” is not regulated or even formally defined by the FDA or USDA for US food labels, except when it comes to meat, eggs, and poultry.
Unlike terms such as “USDA Certified Organic” or “Certified Gluten Free,” which require third party verification, the word natural has no legal definition or specific FDA or USDA guidelines associated with it.
Everyone said it wasn’t possible
With these regulations (or lack thereof) and chemical-ridden flavoring processes, we realized Copper Cow Coffee was on the brink of disrupting an industry. As with most change-makers, we were met with a whole lot of resistance. Debbie met with factory after factory sharing her plan to add real ground lavender flowers into the ground coffee. The concept was so foreign that one by one, every processor told her she needed to spray them with a lavender “essence” instead of using the real deal.
Undeterred, and unwilling to settle for the synthetic-tasting lavender essences, Debbie decided to take things into her own hands. She found one facility to process the lavender and another to process the coffee, then mixed them together to ensure the perfect ratio of ingredients in each coffee filter. It was a lot of extra work and expense, but the result was worth it.
It didn’t always come up smelling like roses
Lavender Lattes became an instant hit, and they flew off the shelves faster than we could make them. We were ecstatic, and after brewing up a ton of new flavor options, we settled on Rose as our second coffee flavor. It was a team favorite and we found the most amazing rose petal supplier. Unfortunately when we finally had the packaging arrive and were ready to manufacture, our supplier was out of stock and wouldn’t have more for another six months.
We could not find another food-grade rose petal supplier – only food-grade whole rose blossoms. In another act of persistence, we ended up buying those, blending them up in a Vitamix ourselves, and sending them to the factory for our second latte flavor!
Flavored coffee with nothing to hide
The success of our Lavender and Rose Lattes showed us that we weren’t the only ones looking for a flavored coffee that didn’t taste like it was made in a lab.
Using the same whole ingredient approach, we’ve expanded our lineup over the years to include new signature flavors like Churro and Vanilla, as well as small-batch lattes like Pumpkin Spice, Mint, and Cardamom. What hasn’t changed is our commitment to using only real herbs and spices ground into the coffee - never essences, syrups, solvents, or artificial anything. When you start with the highest quality coffee, you’ve got nothing to hide.