The NCA’s National Coffee Data Trends (NCDT) report is an essential compendium of coffee statistics, offering the most in-depth coffee industry market research currently available — and it just received its biannual update. The Fall 2022 edition of the NCDT revealed a wealth of exciting trends in the coffee world today, but one of the more promising revelations is that more young Americans are drinking coffee than ever before. 

For older Americans, coffee is a no-brainer. In each surveyed age group of Americans over 25 years old (25-39, 40-59, and 60+) roughly 69% of respondents had had coffee in the past day. However, for younger Americans (18-24), 51% of those surveyed had a coffee within the past day. 

Despite this 18 point gap in coffee consumption between young people and older age groups, the divide is narrowing. In fact, coffee consumption among 18-to-24-year-olds is up 21% from January 2021 and a larger share of the age group is drinking coffee than ever before, surpassing the previous record of 50% set in September 2020. This indicates an intermediate-term upward trend of young people drinking coffee.

Younger coffee drinkers — especially 25-to-39-year-olds — continue to drive consumption of espresso-based and non-espresso-based specialty coffee drinks, which includes preparations such as cappuccino, espresso, lattes, frozen blended coffee, cold brew, and nitro coffee (for more definitions, check out page 16 of the free preview of the Fall 2022 NCDT.)

As more drinks catering to the tastes of young adults are developed, it is not unlikely that we will see young Americans drinking more and more coffee. However this trend develops, you can be sure that we will be updating these numbers in our Spring 2023 National Coffee Data Trends report. In the meantime, we invite you to explore our exclusive collection of in-depth data on this topic and many other coffee trends in the full Fall 2022 NCDT report available here.