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A viral coffee drink created by a little college town coffee shop on the outskirts of Minneapolis is now making its way around the world after its inventors decided to give the recipe away for free.<\/p>\n
After Little Joy Coffee\u2019s raspberry danish latte, a spring seasonal drink, went viral in March, the shop\u2019s owners decided to encourage coffee shops to rip off the recipe directly and add it to their menus.<\/p>\n
Posting both a home recipe and step-by-step instructions for coffee shops, they asked shops if they wanted to be added to a map of places that will serve the raspberry danish latte. Hundreds of shops quickly signed up. A map of the shops shows a presence on every continent except Antarctica, with pins in dozens of countries. The map has nearly 2m views.<\/p>\n
<\/span> Photograph: Little Joy Coffee<\/p>\n Baristas from the shop recently tasted the raspberry danish latte their shop invented while on vacation in Dublin, Ireland \u2013 a sign of just how far the latte had traveled.<\/p>\n The idea came from the shop\u2019s video series, \u201cDIY or buy,\u201d showing people how their recipes were made and how much the ingredients cost. As Americans (and everyone else) struggle with affordability, the videos aim to give people a more realistic idea of what it costs to serve up their favorite beverages.<\/p>\n Little Joy Coffee\u2019s raspberry danish latte costs $8 and is made up of a house-made raspberry syrup sitting at the bottom, followed by milk and a double shot of espresso. A vanilla cream cheese foam floats at the top, completed with two raspberries on a skewer. The cost to DIY? About $2.46, the shop estimated, not including the labor costs or any needed tools.<\/p>\n \u201cThe verdict is in: don\u2019t make this one at home,\u201d store manager Serena Walker said in the video.<\/p>\n The shop, set in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, with a population of about 20,000 and a town slogan of \u201ccows, colleges, community\u201d, knew most of the people who saw the video wouldn\u2019t be able to visit in person and try it.<\/p>\n \u201cBut this brings us to a flaw in the whole \u2018DIY or buy\u2019 premise: how are you supposed to buy this if you live 1,000 miles away? Which is why we\u2019re inviting any coffee shop to steal this drink and put it on their own menu. Not you, Starbucks,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n Cody Larson, the owner of Little Joy Coffee, came up with the idea after recognizing that most of the shop\u2019s 132,000+ followers on Instagram wouldn\u2019t come to Northfield, an exurb about 45 minutes south of Minneapolis. The shop has been open since 2019, and it was a coffee cart for several years before that.<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: Little Joy Coffee<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, nah, that won\u2019t work because nobody\u2019s gonna actually put it on their menu. I even wrote in my notes app, pros and cons of doing this. The con was, we would look like losers, because nobody would put it on their menu.\u201d<\/p>\n Small coffee shops see each other less as competition, more as collaborators, Larson said. The competition is the big chains. Small shops are usually all friendly with each other. Sharing the recipe was an extension of that.<\/p>\n \u201cI think just giving permission was really cool for a lot of shops that were watching from afar, and like, oh, that\u2019d be cool to have on our menu, but I don\u2019t want to be like a copycat,\u201d Larson said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t hurt us any if a coffee shop in California has the same drink as us. We\u2019re not worried about that.\u201d<\/p>\n Little Joy doesn\u2019t vet the coffee shops that sign up, so people should reach out to the shops to make sure they have the latte on their menu. And there\u2019s no way to vet how another shop makes the drink. Larson said people will email to say they swapped out certain ingredients and made adjustments, almost looking for his approval, but it\u2019s all out of his hands now.<\/p>\n \u201cI assume we\u2019re not gonna catch any bad reviews from a drink at a different shop,\u201d he said. \u201cI think people understand, it\u2019s from shop to shop, there\u2019s gonna be differences, even if the drink has the same name.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: Little Joy Coffee<\/p>\n The raspberry danish latte wasn\u2019t a fixture of the Little Joy menu. It was a special spring seasonal drink, and it won\u2019t stay on the menu past the spring, either. In the short time it\u2019s been on the menu, it has become the shop\u2019s top seller, beating out a standard plain latte.<\/p>\n It was inspired by \u2013 no surprise here \u2013 a raspberry danish. The raspberry syrup is like the raspberry filling of the pastry, the cream cheese foam like a pastry cream.<\/p>\n Specialty menus focused on seasonal draws have become a feature at many small coffee shops. At Little Joy, they\u2019ve noticed in the last year that drinks with more unexpected or trendier ingredients, like yuzu, weren\u2019t selling well any more, perhaps a reflection of the cost of a specialty latte during a time when people struggle with increased costs of other goods.<\/p>\n The \u201cDIY or buy\u201d series gives people the option to make a signature drink at home, but it also shows them the costs that go into an $8 latte, Walker said.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are like, coffee is so expensive now at small shops, it costs $8,\u201d she said. \u201cBut when you really break it down, you see how little profit we\u2019re actually making off of this, because the ingredients, the labor to make it, the labor to have people give it to you, to have the lights on and everything kind of just gets perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Drinks tied to familiar desserts have drawn in customers. A carrot cake latte \u201cwent absolutely crazy\u201d, Larson said. He\u2019s inspired by mixology and cocktail culture \u2013 one recipe, for a cardamom bun latte, used a fat washing technique used by mixologists to create the syrup. He tried various attempts at a mango sticky rice latte before landing on the raspberry danish.<\/p>\n People commenting on the shop\u2019s videos would often say they wished they lived near Little Joy so they could come and try the drinks. There are sometimes detractors, like people who say the raspberry danish latte isn\u2019t that original and didn\u2019t deserve the hype.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, that\u2019s the equivalent of the person in the Museum of Modern Art or something, looking at the abstract painting like, I could have done that. Well, you didn\u2019t,\u201d Larson said. \u201cAnd we did put a lot of work in, just figuring out the right ratios.\u201d<\/p>\n In person, the shop serves townies and college professors mostly in the morning, then sees student traffic from the two private colleges in Northfield in the afternoons. After the viral recipe, people have driven from hours away to try the drink in person, Walker said. It\u2019s often people visiting family, but sometimes it\u2019s just for Little Joy.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes, I\u2019ll check the Instagram later and see that somebody tagged us in a story, and they\u2019re like, I drove two hours to be here, and I\u2019m like, Oh my gosh, I served them. That\u2019s so scary. It\u2019s a lot of pressure,\u201d Walker said.<\/p>\n Larson is still surprised at how far the latte has spread and brainstorming ways to follow up. The shop will probably create another recipe for other places to rip off with permission, but not too often \u2013 he wants to be sure it\u2019s something that people will buy, where the recipe works well. But Little Joy now has a lot of other coffee shops following it online, so maybe there are other ways to share education.<\/p>\n \u201cI still don\u2019t understand how it went so far,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd, I\u2019m just thinking, OK, what\u2019s next? Not like how do we outdo this or anything, just like, OK, what do we do with this new following?\u201d<\/p>\n