Behind the Flavor: Raspberry Italian Ice

We originally called this one Raspberry Sorbet.

The idea started with the artist formerly known as Prince, RIP. More specifically, with a lyric from Raspberry Beret. We wanted to paraphrase the lyric and add our twist:

Raspberry sorbet, the kind you find in a grocery store. 

It was a pretty good, and equally important, fun, name. 

Then we tasted it.

During the tasting, someone said it reminded them of Italian ice.

Once they said it, everyone knew exactly what they meant. It wasn't necessarily that the flavor was fundamentally different from raspberry sorbet. It was the association. Italian ice also made so much more sense for the Ice Cream Truck season. Suddenly Raspberry Italian Ice was the new name.

But the flavor itself had another problem. It was almost too believable.

Raspberry and coffee work surprisingly well together. Something we've learned over the years is berry flavors generally have a natural complementary relationship with coffee. Citrus is a different story. We have an amazing lemon coffee that we'll get to in a later season, but citrus doesn't always play as nicely with coffee as berries do.

Put lemon and raspberry together though, and something happens.

Tea.

The combination was so recognizable that drinking the coffee hot could make you think of raspberry lemon tea before you thought about coffee. We tried to get away from it. We pushed the raspberry forward, pulled the lemon back, then reversed the balance. But the particular lemon note that made it taste like Italian ice or sorbet had to stay. Swap it for a fresher lemon or a lemon-rind note, and we lost the icy-treat character we were trying to capture. We kept adjusting the balance, but every road led back to the same place.

It didn't matter. Every road led back to the same place. 

Eventually, we stopped trying to make it something it wasn't.

If the flavor wanted to be an incredibly convincing raspberry lemon experience, then that's what we were going to make. We leaned into it and made the best representation of that flavor combination we could.

The tradeoff was that some of the earthy character you normally look for in coffee comes through less. But the flavor itself is remarkably true to what we're trying to evoke.

That's an interesting problem to have when you're making flavored coffee.

The process in making exceptional flavored coffee isn't only about getting the right flavors to show up. It's also deciding how much you're willing to let them take over.

For Raspberry Italian Ice, we decided to let 'er rip.

Raspberry Sorbet became Raspberry Italian Ice. The Prince reference stayed in the origin story but the flavor got its own identity.

The Development Notes

Raspberry works naturally with coffee, while the combination of raspberry and lemon can create a flavor profile strongly associated with tea. During development, changing the balance between the two flavors consistently produced the same result, so we chose to preserve the most convincing expression of raspberry lemon rather than force more coffee character into the cup.

MISSION STATUS: Flavor Forward 
Flavors Released: 13 / 52
Ice Cream Truck Season 2: 6 of 9 weeks
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On Track

What Is Flavored Coffee Supposed to Taste Like?

Vanilla, caramel, hazelnut, chocolate.

Those flavors need no introduction in coffee. But say cherry, white lemon, and blue raspberry and people stop for a second.

Good. That pause is exactly why we made Popsicle Firecracker flavored coffee.

Flavor52 was never meant to be 52 versions of what people already expect flavored coffee to be. We knew some releases would feel familiar, some would trigger nostalgia, and some would make people ask what exactly were we thinking.

Firecracker is one of those. Cherry. White lemon. Blue raspberry.

It may not sound like coffee. That’s kind of the point.

Before we finalized it, we bought the actual Firecracker Popsicles and tasted them alongside the coffee samples. The goal wasn’t to make “fruit flavored coffee.” It was to recreate the unmistakable experience of that red, white, and blue Popsicle.

Cherry and blue raspberry fit surprisingly well against the deeper character of the coffee. Lemon was the trickier note. Since we were able to use it lightly, it blended into the medium light roast’s natural citrus qualities instead of turning sharp or taking over. The three notes had to work together closely enough that what came through was Firecracker, not three competing fruit flavors.

Will everyone hear “cherry, lemon, and blue raspberry flavored coffee” and immediately crave a big mug of it? Not sure. 

But expanding flavored coffee means making room for more than the usual suspects. Vanilla, chocolate, caramel, and hazelnut are classics for a reason. We’re not trying to replace them. We’re interested in what happens beyond them.

There are thousands of flavors people already love. Candy. Desserts. Fruit. Frozen treats. The foods that take you straight back to a particular summer, birthday party, or gas station snack aisle.

Some feel obvious in coffee. The more interesting ones are the flavors that don’t. Until you taste them. That’s the broader concept behind Flavor52.

Maybe you don’t think cherry, lemon, and blue raspberry belong in coffee.

That’s fair. But remember, neither did caramel once.

MISSION STATUS: Expanding Flavored Coffee 
Flavors Released: 13 / 52
Ice Cream Truck Season 2: 5 of 9 weeks
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On track

How It Started vs. How It's Going

In 2014, we were buying roasted coffee from a local roaster in Portchester, New York. He was old school, a coffee guy who had been in the business since the 1970s. He roasted it, we bought it fresh, brought it back to our operation, added the flavors and turned it into what we sold.

Even then, we weren't taking the easy route. We flavored it in-house. We gound the coffee beans in-house and worked of the grind size until it was perfected for both bagged ground coffee and coffee pods. The coffee still had to run through our pod filling machines, many of which were essentially built from scratch. We had to get the right filter paper, fill the pods, heat seal them, quality test them, pack them and get them out the door. But in those early days, the coffee itself arrived finished. The one part we did not yet control was the roast itself.

Then we bought our first Probat roaster . It was beautiful.

The smell alone was intoxicating. So were the possibilities. For the first time, we could change the roast ourselves, experiment with roast development, and understand what the coffee was doing before flavor ever entered the picture. The coffee stopped being something that arrived finished. It became part of the process. Flavor had mattered from the beginning. It was baked into the Java Factory brand. But over time, how we developed it got a lot more systematic.

One of the biggest steps was bringing Tejal Vekaria onto the team. Her background included product development at Unilever and at American Instants, a company with decades of experience in coffee, beverage mixes, and custom blending. With Tejal came a formal version of something we'd already been doing by instinct. We built a sensory panel and put the team through sensory training. We learned to describe what we tasted consistently and, just as important, to separate personal preference from what was actually happening in the cup.

When you are making 8 or 9 flavors instinct gets you pretty far. Make dozens, and instinct alone stops being enough. We needed a way to compare formulations, identify what changed, understand why something worked, and say so clearly enough that the rest of the team understood it too. Over time, that became a repeatable approach to flavor development. The coffee. The roasting. The manufacturing. The sensory work. The people who understood how it all fit together. We were building capability without really thinking of it that way.

In 2014, we weren't laying groundwork for 52 flavors in 52 weeks. We were solving the problems in front of us. How do we make this flavor better? How do we make the coffee better? How do we know when a formulation is actually finished? One decision led to the next. Eventually, those decisions added up to something much bigger than any one of them. A system for developing flavored coffee. That system is what made Flavor52 possible. Because 52 flavors in 52 weeks takes more than 52 ideas. You have to develop them, evaluate them, adjust them, reproduce them, manufacture them.

Then do it again the following week. And then the week after that.

In 2014, we were buying roasted coffee from a local New York roaster. Today, we're using everything we built since then to run Flavor52. Fifty-two flavors. Fifty-two weeks. One Monday after another.

We didn't get here by setting out to build the capability for Flavor52. We got here by spending years building a company that eventually could do it.

The Development Notes

Java Factory's approach to flavored coffee developed over years of increasing control and experience, from buying pre-roasted coffee to roasting our own, then formalizing sensory evaluation and building a trained internal panel.

That progression gave us the coffee roasting, flavor development, sensory and manufacturing experience required to execute Flavor52.

Flavor52 is the result of capabilities that were built long before Flavor52 existed.

MISSION STATUS: Making 52 flavors happen
Flavors Released: 12 / 52
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On Track

BEHIND THE FLAVOR

Klondike Milk Chocolate & Vanilla Ice Cream

Getting a great license is one thing. Getting the flavor to be great is another.

When you're developing a licensed flavored coffee, you're not simply trying to make something that tastes good. You're trying to make something that tastes enough like the original product that the people who know that product better than anyone else will recognize it.

That's what made Klondike interesting.

We weren't trying to just put Klondike into a coffee pod. We were trying to figure out what makes a Klondike taste like a Klondike when the thing you're tasting is coffee.

That meant starting with the flavor itself and working backward.

Chocolate was an obvious part of the answer, but chocolate isn't one thing. Coffee already brings its own chocolate and cocoa notes to the cup, and if you let the chocolate get too far out in front, the profile starts moving in the wrong direction. We wanted milk chocolate, not a darker chocolate profile.

So we increased the vanilla.

That did two things at once. It pushed the chocolate toward the softer, creamier character of milk chocolate, while also making the vanilla more prominent. The vanilla finishes at the end of the sip, which was important because that's part of what makes the profile feel like ice cream rather than simply chocolate coffee.

There was another detail we had to account for. Ice cream has a subtle tang that most people probably wouldn't describe as sour when they're eating it. But take that characteristic away and something feels missing. You may not know exactly what you're looking for, but your brain knows the flavor isn't quite right.

That is the kind of attention to detail that matters when you're trying to recreate a familiar flavor in an entirely different format.

We went through three different formulations, each at three concentrations. Nine different versions of Klondike Milk Chocolate & Vanilla Ice Cream flavored coffee.

By the time we sent the samples to the Klondike team, we had already done a lot of the work. They approved the first version they tasted.

That isn't always the case, so it was incredibly validating. When it comes to the team responsible for the Klondike brand, you can't fake it. The flavor profile has to be spot on. They know that flavor better than we ever could, and getting their approval was more than just a great licensing collaboration. It was confirmation that our process had done what we set out to do.

Obviously, nobody can predict commercial success from a flavor approval. There is a long road between someone saying, "Yes, that tastes like Klondike," and customers deciding they want to drink it.

But sitting in that tasting room, knowing that the people responsible for one of the most recognizable ice cream brands in America had tasted what we created and said yes, was pretty satisfying. This is going to be a good one. 

Development Notes

• Klondike Milk Chocolate & Vanilla Ice Cream required the flavor profile to be recognizable as Klondike while still functioning as a brewed coffee.
• Coffee's natural chocolate and cocoa notes meant the chocolate component had to be carefully controlled.
• Increasing vanilla shifted the chocolate toward a softer milk chocolate character while creating a distinct vanilla finish.
• A subtle tang was important to the overall ice cream character, even though it is not typically perceived as a distinct "sour" flavor.
• Three formulations were evaluated at three concentrations, for nine total versions.
• The first version sent to the Klondike team was approved.

MISSION STATUS: Flavor Profile Expertly Matched 
Flavors Released: 12 / 52
Ice Cream Truck Season 2: 4 of 9 weeks
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: 1/4 finished 

EMERGENCY ENTRY

THE COMPANY SAVE

We weren't planning on writing a Flavor Log today. We were preparing the variety pack for with the season winners of the Throwback Collection and we reviewed the Season 1 leaderboard again.

The top four flavors earned permanent spots. Oatmeal Cookie finished first with a 9.0, followed by Candied Pecan at 8.7. Sunday Pancakes and Grandma's Candy tied at 8.3.

And then there was Monkey Bread at 8.2. It was one tenth of a point from making the permanent lineup but sadly, didn't make it and that should be the end of the story.

Except....Monkey Bread had overwhelmingly good customer feedback and strong sales throughout the season. People bought it. Sometimes more than once. It was one of those flavors that kept telling us something through the numbers, even if the final rating didn't quite put it in the top four.

So we made a decision. Monkey Bread gets the first ever Company Save.

The idea behind the Company Save is pretty simple. The leaderboard decides which flavors earn a permanent place, but we realized that there needed to be room for a flavor that narrowly misses the cut but clearly deserves to stick around.

It won't happen every season. Most of the time, the leaderboard will be the leaderboard as planned. But sometimes a flavor is too good to let go.

Monkey Bread was 0.1 away. We're keeping it.

MISSION STATUS: COMPANY SAVE ACTIVATED.
Flavors Released: 11 / 52
Ice Cream Truck Season 2: 3 of 9 weeks completed 
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On Track

Monkey Bread: Permanent.

BEHIND THE FLAVOR

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

We kept making the Breyers Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough flavored coffee. 6 times in a row. Every time it kept tasting like just chocolate.

The cookie dough was in the formulation. But all that could be tasted was the chocolate. Pretty good chocolate coffee as far as chocolate coffee goes, but just chocolate. No believability on the cookie dough front.  When you took a sip, your brain kept landing in the same place.

Chocolate.

We kept adjusting the cookie dough component, trying to get the flavor to announce itself more clearly, and the coffee kept pulling everything back toward the chocolate profile.

So we changed the approach and pushed the vanilla. A lot.

And suddenly the coffee stopped reading like chocolate with something in the background. The vanilla brought out the soft, rich, creamy character we were looking for, and the whole profile started to read differently.

The tasting room finally agreed. Cookie dough.

That distinction matters because cookie dough doesn't taste like a chocolate chip cookie before it goes into the oven. It has its own character. It's softer, sweeter and more rounded, with that unmistakable vanilla richness running through the dough.

Once we found that balance, the rest of the flavor made sense.

Part of the problem was the coffee itself. Coffee naturally carries chocolate and cocoa-like notes, so the chocolate already had a head start. We weren't just trying to add cookie dough. We were trying to make it recognizable through a coffee that already wanted to speak chocolate.

Chocolate chips. Sweet dough. Vanilla doing enough work to make the whole thing taste like cookie dough instead of chocolate coffee wearing a cookie dough name.

Development Notes

• Several early formulations kept reading primarily as chocolate, even with the cookie dough component present.
• Increasing the cookie dough component wasn't enough to make the profile recognizable. 
• A significant increase in vanilla shifted the balance and brought forward the soft, creamy character we were looking for.

MISSION STATUS: Flavor approved.

Flavor 11 / 52

Mondays Missed: 0

World Record Status: On Track

The Flavor That Almost Missed Monday

Here is the a story of lids, planes and steamships. Three weeks before Ice Cream Truck Season was supposed to launch, we had a problem.

The lids that go on top of the pods for the first flavor, Creamsicle were in stock. However, the lids for Sticky Situation were not.

That might not sound like a crisis until you understand how far ahead we normally have to plan. We try to stay at least six weeks ahead of production. 6 weeks.  It sounds like a lot. It's usually enough. Our lids come from a large overseas manufacturer, and under normal circumstances they travel by ship. The trip takes about a month, which is why the six week cushion matters. We plan around the lead time, place the orders and try to stay well ahead of the production schedule.

Flavor52 adds another layer to that planning. Our VIP and Full Journey members receive four or five flavors at a time, which means every flavor in that shipment has to be ready together. Even if flavor 1 is ready to go, if flavors two, three, or four aren't- you can't ship. Being prepared for one flavor doesn't help much if the next one is sitting in a shipping container somewhere. 

We had done what we were supposed to do. We had planned ahead. The problem was that due to shipping pressures, the definition of "ahead" had changed underneath us. With three weeks left, it was clear that the normal shipping methods weren't going to get the Sticky Situation lids here in time. Yes, the irony was not lost on us that this flavor was called Sticky Situation. 

So we called an audible.

We had the manufacturer unpack the shipment to get to the lids we needed, pulled them out of the normal shipping flow and sent them by air.

It was a much more expensive way to move a batch of lids halfway around the world. It was also the only way we could see to keep the Monday launch on schedule.

Sticky Situation lids made it. The coffee got packed. The boxes went out. Monday flavor drop happened.

This was the closest we've come to missing a Flavor52 flavor launch so far, and it had nothing to do with the flavor itself. The coffee was ready. The production schedule was ready. The customers were waiting.

We just needed the lids.

An interesting note about making 52 new flavors is everyone sees the coffee and the flavor. The part that kept us up for a few nights was a piece of metal that nobody will ever think about once it's sitting on top of the coffee pod.

MISSION STATUS: Crisis Averted. Flavor Dropped.
Flavors Released: 10 / 52
Throwbacks Season 1: Complete
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On Track

How Peanut Brittle Became Sticky Situation

There isn't actually any brittle in Sticky Situation.

No crunch or shards of caramelized sugar to get stuck in your teeth. Just coffee.

So why did we call it Peanut Brittle Caramel Ice Cream?

We knew caramel ice cream was going to be part of the flavor, but a straightforward peanut caramel felt a little too obvious. We wanted a more developed peanut profile, so we added a layer of toffee on top of the caramel. The toffee gave the peanut more depth and pushed it toward that rich, toasted sweetness you associate with peanut brittle.

So while it's almost impossible to truly recreate peanut brittle in a cup of coffee because so much is happening from the texture, the flavor profile was exactly what we were after. Peanut, caramel and that extra toffee character gave us something that felt much more like the flavor of peanut brittle than a basic peanut caramel coffee would have.

And then there was the name.

"Peanut Toffee Caramel Ice Cream" would have told you exactly what was in the flavor, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Peanut Brittle Caramel had more personality, and it fit perfectly with the name we had already landed on:

Sticky Situation.

The flavor name isn't a literal ingredient list. It's a mental shortcut to the experience you're supposed to have when you taste it. That's one of the fun parts of developing flavors. Sometimes you're not trying to recreate something literally. You're trying to figure out which parts of it people recognize and love, then translate those parts into coffee.

The brittle isn't in the cup. The idea of it is.

The Development Notes

• We wanted a more developed peanut profile than a straightforward peanut caramel.
• Adding a toffee layer gave the peanut more depth and pushed the flavor toward the profile of peanut brittle.
• "Brittle" describes the flavor we were chasing, building the flavor that makes you think of it.
• The name Sticky Situation fit the flavor better than simply calling it Peanut Toffee Caramel.

MISSION STATUS: Building Flavors
Flavors Released: 10 / 52
Throwbacks Season 1: Complete
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On Track

Why We Chose the Ice Cream Truck

There are certain words that don't really need an explanation.

Ice cream truck is one of them.

Say those two words and you can almost hear it before you see it: that little song coming down the street, dollar bills and loose change in your hand, and the scramble to catch it before it gets to the next stop. You're trying to decide what you're going to get while you're still chasing it, hoping the truck doesn't drive away before you get there.

That's what makes the ice cream truck so interesting to us. It's one of the last pieces of shared Americana we have left. From Brooklyn to Boise, the words ice cream truck mean pretty much the same thing. The neighborhood changes, the truck changes, but the feeling doesn't.

That feeling was a big reason we chose Ice Cream Truck as Season 2 of Flavor52.

The other reason was flavor profile.

When we started looking at the ice cream world, we noticed something pretty quickly: a lot of classic ice cream flavors naturally make sense with coffee. Vanilla, chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, nuts, cookies, marshmallow, brown sugar and cream all have something that works well in coffee.

Coffee already brings roasted, chocolatey, nutty and caramelized notes of its own. That gives those flavors to attach to.

So we started asking a different question.

Not just "What ice cream flavors do people love?"

But:

"Which of those flavors can become great coffee?"

That's where the season started to get interesting because not every flavor cooperates.

Creamsicle was one of the ones that made us think twice. Citrus and coffee can be tricky because you're bringing additional acidity into something that already has acidity and bitterness.

We eventually got it to work, but the answer wasn't as straightforward as orange, vanilla and cream, as you might think.

That was dealt with in the previous Flavor Log.

So that's why we chose the ice cream truck. It gave us a feeling almost everyone recognizes and a whole world of flavors we couldn't wait to put into coffee.

MISSION STATUS: Season 2 started
Flavors Released: 9 / 52
Throwbacks Season 1: Complete
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: progressing 

Creamsicle Flavored Coffee Is Harder Than It Sounds

Creamsicle flavoring sounds easy.  

Orange. Vanilla. Cream. How hard is that? Pretty hard, actually.

The problem starts with the orange.

Fresh orange is bright, juicy and acidic. Coffee has acidity too. Put the two together, then bring coffee's natural bitterness into the conversation, and things start to get unpleasant pretty quickly.

If we had simply tried to put fresh orange into coffee, we wouldn't have had a very good starting point. But that's not really what a Creamsicle tastes like and that distinction mattered a lot.

The orange you taste in a Creamsicle has already been transformed from fresh orange. 

It's sweeter. Rounder. More confectionary. More like an orange candy than a piece of fresh fruit. Then vanilla and cream soften it even further. That's the orange we were trying to capture and that gave us something we could work with. The first version still tasted like orange candy and still too acidic coffee. We threw it out. Same with the second version. We realized that even after we got the flavor relationship right, there was another problem: intensity.

Flavor52 is built around flavor and is generally flavor-forward. We're not shy about it. But sometimes making a flavor more pronounced makes it worse.

That was especially true here.

Push the orange too hard and the acidity starts to announce itself. Then the coffee's own acidity and bitterness enter the conversation, and the balance can get lost. So we deliberately made Creamsicle flavored coffee one of the more mild flavors in the lineup because in this case less was more. Making the flavor milder resulted in a better, more drinkable overall cup of coffee. 

The goal wasn't to make a cup of coffee that tasted like someone had melted a Creamsicle into it. The coffee still needed to be coffee. The Creamsicle flavor needed to live inside it.

That sounds like a small distinction, but it's a pretty important one when you're developing flavored coffee. We don't just ask, "Can we make this flavor?" We ask: "How much of this flavor is perfect in this coffee?"

That's where the details matter.

Every Java Factory flavor is proprietary, measured and refined before it goes into production. The finished flavor must be consistently right, and that means sometimes the best decision isn't adding more; it's intentionally pulling back.

With Creamsicle, the sweet spot was finding the point where you could taste the orange, vanilla and cream without losing the coffee underneath them. You're not supposed to think you're drinking a Creamsicle. You're supposed to take a sip and think: "Wait. That's Creamsicle!" Intensity isn't the same thing as authenticity.

This is a coffee with Creamsicle flavor, not a Creamsicle pretending to be coffee. 

What we learned

• Orange acidity can compete with coffee acidity.
• Higher flavor intensity wasn't better.
• The target was recognition without overpowering the coffee.
• Final approach: restrained orange + vanilla + cream.

MISSION STATUS: THE ICE CREAM TRUCK HAS ARRIVED

Flavors Released: 9 / 52
Season 1 — Throwbacks: Complete
Mondays Missed: 0
World Record Status: On Track

BEHIND THE FLAVOR

Monkey Bread is one of those desserts where either someone grew up with it and lights up the moment they hear the name... or they have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. If you happen to fall into the second group, Monkey Bread isn't actually bread at all. It's pieces of soft pastry dough coated in butter, cinnamon, brown sugar and caramel, baked together until the outside becomes sticky and caramelized while the inside stays warm and pillowy. It's the kind of dessert that disappears because everyone keeps pulling off "just one more piece."

Sometimes that's the whole story. 

By now you may have noticed a pattern. Some flavors are harder to develop than others, some almost get cut, some miss deadlines, and some create debates that last for weeks.

And then... there's Oatmeal Cookie.

We had the idea, we made it, it tasted like an oatmeal cookie pretty much on the first try ( we did increase the icing flavor a bit), everyone smiled, and we approved it. .

THE YEAR COFFEE DOUBLED

SATURDAY MORNING RULES

This week, we launched a tribute to Saturday Morning Cartoons.

Before streaming and YouTube, there was one rule every kid understood: you got one chance. If your favorite cartoon started at 9:00, you were in front of the TV at 8:59. There was no pause button, and no "I'll watch it later." If you missed it, you missed it.

Looking back, it's interesting how much of childhood worked that way. The ice cream truck, the latest toy, even cereal prizes. None of them waited for you. Maybe that's part of why they became such lasting memories. They were temporary, and you had to be there.

That is some of the idea behind Flavor52 too. Every Monday, a new flavor arrives. Some will stay, many won't. If you skip one, there is a good chance it won't be waiting for you six months from now. It is a little inconvenient, but it is also what makes it exciting. Some things are better when they aren't available forever. That's a lesson Saturday morning cartoons taught us long before we started making coffee.

THE FLAVOR WE ALMOST ABANDONED

Not every flavor fights back. Marshmallow did.

When we started developing this weeks flavor, I Love Rocky Road, we knew chocolate wouldn't be the hard part and we thought adding marshmallow would be relatively simple, and this would be one of those flavors that came together quickly. Marshmallow refused to cooperate.

Every version tasted close. But not right. Too sweet. Disappeared after brewing. Tasted like vanilla pretending to be marshmallow. The biggest problem though is that is kept getting overpowered by the chocolate. 

The problem is that marshmallow isn't actually a loud flavor. It's soft. Warm. Fluffy. It's less of a taste than it is a feeling and somehow we had to bring out that feeling as if it were hiding inside a cup of coffee. Behind chocolate. 

Day after day, tiny adjustments. A new formulation. A different balance. A different finish. Every sample got closer but never quite crossed the line.

Eventually someone asked the question nobody wanted to hear. "What if marshmallow just isn't possible in this combination?"

For a moment, we actually considered it.

So we went back to basics. Bags of marshmallows. Eaten slowly. Deliberately. Paying attention not just to the taste but to where exactly in your mouth it registered. The tip of the tongue. The roof. The back. Marshmallow doesn't announce itself the way chocolate does. It settles. It lingers in a very specific place and for a very specific moment before it disappears.

That was the answer we had been missing.

Once we knew exactly where marshmallow lived, we could finally engineer a coffee that found the same address. One tiny adjustment and suddenly it clicked.

The marshmallow stopped trying to be loud and started doing what marshmallow has always done. Making everything around it taste better.

Rocky Road wasn't missing a marshmallow flavor. It was missing a marshmallow experience.

Sometimes the biggest breakthrough isn't adding something. It's understanding what you're looking for.

The Quiet Start

FLAVOR ORIGINS 

Week 4 is Grandma's Candy

Everyone remembers Grandma's house a little differently.

Maybe it was the smell of something baking in the oven. Maybe it was the old furniture, the family photos, or the candy dish that somehow never ran out.

For a lot of us, that candy dish held butterscotch or caramel candies. They weren't the newest treats or the ones we begged our parents to buy., but they were always there. Arranged neatly in a bowl on the coffee table, or tucked away in a purse. The little candies no one remembered buying, but everyone remembered eating.
It's funny how memory works.

Ask someone what their grandmother smelled like, and they'll probably pause.

Ask them about the candy dish on her coffee table, and they'll tell you the color of the wrappers.

That's where the thought for Grandma's Candy began.

For the middle flavor of the Throwback season, we didn't want to recreate a specific candy, we wanted to recreate a feeling or a moment in time.

Often, the sweetest food memories aren't about what we ate. They're about where we were and who we were with. If this coffee reminds you of someone, then we did our job.

Originally recorded: Mar 16th 2026

When the tasting room agrees. 

Today we taste tested Jelly Donut flavored coffee. When we first started developing this flavor, we weren't convinced it would make the final lineup. On paper, it sounded like one of those flavors that would get a laugh in the tasting room and then quietly disappear into the pile of ideas that were fun to try but never quite good enough to release. That happens more often than people would think. One of the easiest mistakes to make when you're developing flavored coffee is falling in love with the idea instead of the coffee. The coffee has to be genuinely good enough to earn the spot.

Some flavors are clever. Some are technically impressive. Some are good but have been done so many times they've become predictable. Every flavor has to taste exactly like what it's supposed to taste like, but even that isn't enough. Jelly Donut was good from the beginning.

By the time it reached the tasting stage, we had three different formulations. None of them were bad. If they had been, they never would have made it this far. The question wasn't whether we had a good Jelly Donut coffee. The question was whether we had the Jelly Donut coffee.

One thing we've learned over the years is that tasting rooms are surprisingly easy to influence. If one person says, "I love the raspberry in this one," everyone else suddenly starts looking for raspberry. If someone declares a favorite too early, it's amazing how quickly the room begins to agree.

So we have a policy: Don't lead the witness.

Nobody says anything until everyone has had a chance to smell the coffee first. Aroma is the first thing our customers experience, so it's the first thing we evaluate. Then we taste. Slowly. People go back to the same cup two or three times. Sometimes they change their minds. Sometimes they don't. Only after everyone has had a chance to form an opinion do we start talking.

At today's tasting, the room was unusually quiet.

People kept moving back and forth between the three cups, taking another sip here, another sip there. Nobody wanted to be the first person to say anything.

Then someone broke the silence.

"This is the one."

There wasn't a debate after that. This was one of the rare occasions where it was understood that the comment didn't change anyone's mind. It simply gave everyone permission to admit what they'd already been thinking. We had a winner. 

After you've developed enough flavored coffees, you learn these moments don't happen very often and when they do, you pay attention.

Behind the Flavor: Jelly Donut

Most people think flavored coffee is just about adding flavor. 

Too little and you don't recognize the flavor. Too much and the coffee disappears.

The goal isn't just to add a bunch of flavoring and go for maximum flavor. The goal is maximum recognition with minimum interference and let the flavor build from the coffee. That's why we don't think in terms of "donut flavor" or "raspberry flavor."

We think in layers.

The base layer belongs to the coffee itself. In good flavored coffee this will still be the most prominent.  The middle layer builds warmth. Its bakery-like notes that your brain already associates with fried dough. The final layer is the smallest, but it is often the most noticeable. In Jelly Donut, that's the raspberry.

Not enough, and your brain never connects the dots.

Too much, and the coffee disappears behind the fruit.

Somewhere in the middle, something interesting happens. When someone can take a sip and immediately say, "That's a jelly donut," they're not tasting more flavor. They're tasting better balance that comes from a foundation we've spent years understanding. Every coffee we've ever developed teaches us something about the next one. The more flavors you create, the more patterns you recognize. Eventually, you stop thinking in flavors. You start thinking in architecture.

That's where great flavored coffee begins.

Missing Mugs

Originally Recorded: July 5, 2026

Behind the Flavor: Candied Pecan

Originally Recorded: July 3, 2026

The First Flavor Friday

Today was our first official #FlavorFriday.

The Idea was simple

Every Friday, everyone brews the same Flavor52 coffee and shares their thoughts with The people that follow them. That was vision at least. We even put a postcard in every season pass box with the Friday dates marked with little check boxes next to them. Today, exactly two people posted. One person jumped the gun and posted their #flavorfriday on Tuesday. We're happy that they reviewed the coffee but they weren't counted in the two people that posted.

I can't say we weren't a little disappointed but we weren't discouraged. Someday there may be thousands of people sharing their Friday coffee reviews. Today there were two

Mission Status: Week 1 of 52

Mood: Optimistic 

Originally recorded: June 29, 2026

Today the first weekly flavor dropped: Sunday Pancakes. We are thrilled with the flavor. This has been a long road with a lot of planning. When people ask us, "What was the start date of Flavor52?" we will probably answer "today". But that is at best, only partially correct. I could tell you about the more than half year of planning but that would be at best only partially correct.

As a flavor-forward brand, we spent years watching nearly every category explode with creativity and begin what we call "flavor culture". Definitely in candy and chocolates but even seltzers and potato chips, while coffee remained largely the same. French Vanilla. Hazelnut. Pumpkin Spice. All great flavors and we even created some great ones of our own, looking at Blueberry Shortcake, but it wasn't becoming what we felt it should evolve into.

The data we had supported what we were seeing.

Our variety packs consistently outperformed individual flavors. Customers weren't asking us to make one more permanent flavor. They were asking us to keep surprising them. That observation changed everything and birthed the idea of Flavor52. Not because we wanted to launch 52 flavors but because we understood that a few new seasonal flavors, even if they were innovative, would just be more of the same as what everyone else was doing. We want flavored coffee to be taken seriously, and we knew if we undertook something with such complexity and diversity that we would be proving it could. Today, that idea officially became real. It will hopefully give a real accounting of this massive undertaking with all f the ups and downs, wins and losses (and there will be both) and what we learned along the way. This is the first entry of the journey. Most will be shorter than this, some longer but we hope that the. Flavor Log becomes more than a behind-the-scenes journal. We hope it becomes a useful record of what it actually looked like to attempt something that had never been done before

Lets get this started.

Mission Status: Week 1 of 52.