At Little Joy Coffee, you’ll find lattes that are more like works of art than caffeinated beverages. You’ll see a wide array of exotic flavor pairings like “ginger beer and lemon cream,” as well as dreamy drinks that are more like desserts, à la “sticky toffee pudding.”
However, what you won’t find there is any gatekeeping.
As Cody Larson, owner of Little Joy, explained to Upworthy, transparency and generosity have always been a part of the company’s DNA.
At first, that looked like their “Latte DIY or Buy” social media series, where Little Joy Coffee barista Serena Walker would break down the labor and ingredient costs to make one of their signature drinks so that customers could decide whether or not it was worth spending upwards of $8.
What was meant to drive online engagement actually paid off in real life, too. The cafe got much busier after it started giving recipes away.
Then came the raspberry danish latte
…which is a delectable caffeinated concoction featuring homemade raspberry syrup and cream cheese cold foam (That’s a thing? Will wonders never cease!).
That quickly became the shop’s bestselling latte. But as Larson shared, it didn’t feel like enough to share the at-home recipe for this drink. Nor did they want their growing fanbase online to miss out if they lived far away from Northfield, Minnesota, and didn’t have the time and energy to DIY.
That’s when they decided to share it with other independent coffee shops.
“We’re inviting any coffee shop to steal this drink and put it on their own menu. Not you, Starbucks,” Walker said in the now-viral video, revealing that Little Joy Coffee would offer an at-scale recipe to any small-business competitor.
“I was a little worried that no one would put it on their menu and we’d look like losers,” confessed Larson.
But the next morning, the recipe had already been downloaded 9,000 times.
So far, about 450 shops across the globe have taken the offer, including shops in Canada, the U.K., South Korea, Malaysia, and New Zealand. And the raspberry danish latte seems just as popular, no matter where it’s sold.
“We don’t even have it on the regular menu because the raspberry syrup we’re making is going so fast,” Ripesh Neupane, owner of 33 Peaks Café in Southlake, Texas, told Today. “If we keep it on the menu, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with demand.”
“Exclusivity as a selling point might be dead”
For Larson, the biggest takeaway from this experiment is that “exclusivity as a selling point might be dead.”
She argued that, more than the recipe itself, what made the raspberry danish latte really take off was the sense of camaraderie it built in the real world.
“People appreciated that a bunch of independent coffee shops got together to take something off the screen and bring it out into the real world, where almost everyone can try it,” she said.
If you’re curious about where the nearest opportunity to get your hands on one of these decadent raspberry danish lattes is, you can check out this map.
Here’s to one small step for small businesses, and one giant leap for the return of community.
