FL52: FLAVOR LOG

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 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.

MISSION STATUS: Never give up too early.

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 didnt 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.

MISSION STATUS: Nostalgia unlocked.

Date Mar 16th: 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.

Mission Status: Formulation #3 advanced to production.

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.

Originally Recorded: July 5, 2026

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

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 ever came out with some greatness 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.