Specialty Coffee, Airside

Travelling to and from holiday or work often involves significant time in transit. While travel can be exhilarating, it often includes lengthy waits between various modes of transportation—taxis, buses, trains, and aeroplanes—and at transport hubs like poorly signposted pick-up points, bus terminals, train stations, and airports. Many flights leave at yawning time, and due to time constraints or lack of will, preparing a V60 is less than feasible. So, our only recourse is mass-produced, uncared for coffee at the airport, which is unlikely to satisfy our specialty cravings.

A few years ago, YouTuber James Hoffmann released a video on appreciating bad coffee, noting that airports were prime examples of where he endured bitter brews, ultimately fostering a greater appreciation for specialty. But what if airports offered hand-poured coffee, batch brews, and quality espresso drinks? Instead of settling for bad coffee, we could transform our terminal time into a joyous coffee experience.

Fortunately, certain pioneers are bringing that reality a little closer by pushing the boundaries of specialty, even in international airports. However, challenges remain. Let us explore some of these obstacles and the indicators that may signal the welcome emergence of a better sort of brew in the airport setting.

Coffee & the airport experience

In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton reflects on how the idyllic images of our travel destinations often fail to match our actual experiences. The gently swaying palm trees, verdant vistas, and white-sand beaches we envision rarely attend our arrival; they exist far beyond the tarmac, passport control, luggage carousels, and yet more transport. Travel can be taxing. De Botton also highlights that while we seek tranquillity at our destination before departure, we often overlook the fact that we bring ourselves along for the journey. Our self-doubt, anxiety, emotional scars, hopes, and desires accompany us even after check-in. As does our penchant for indelible—or even comforting—specialty coffee.

Recently, I was able to fulfil this desire for coffee self-actualization while waiting in Bogotá’s El Dorado Airport. In a space usually defined by agitated searches for uncomfortable seats and grating announcements about gate closures, a specialty pour-over at Varietale Café turned my two-hour wait from a period of idle boredom into an intellectual retreat. I relaxed into a chair, opened my book, and lost myself in the taste of my brew.

However, this experience is an outlier. For most, airport coffee is a functional necessity rather than a luxury. Airports are inherently stressful spaces governed by surveillance and fear of a missed flight. Travellers are positioned to feel less like guests than suspects, navigating a gauntlet of security checks that breed self-suspicion and anxiety; wouldn’t a delicious coffee and a slice of cake make for a nice reward for having traversed these jitter-inducing tribulations? Sadly, we’re typically met with generic chains offering dark roasts and sugary simulacrums of coffee. Lacking specialty options, we settle for these shadows of the real thing—a brief chemical comfort, perhaps, but hardly a rich sensory experience that reclaims our humanity from the clutches of the airport.

Why no specialty airside?

It’s easy to lament the dearth of specialty outlets in airports. Instead, let’s explore the reasons why specialty has yet to make its mark on this arena. The most obvious factor is cost. Airports are prime retail spaces, attracting millions of travellers each year. But unlike tourists dawdling down the bustling streets of city centres or crowding around popular landmarks, airport passengers are trapped. As I mention above, they have to wait for significant periods, during which they will likely seek sustenance in the form of a snack or drink, and unless one opts for water from restroom faucets, you’re going to have to pay. Consequently, the annual cost of retail space in airports is markedly higher than that of a cosy cafe in a gentrified student neighbourhood.

My research into the rise of specialty cafe culture in Latin America reveals a missed landscape of capital investment for opening coffee shops. many aspiring cafe owners start with limited funds and often face a lack of financial support from banks, contrasting with the situation in the Global North. Generally, specialty cafe owners are not wealthy capitalists with pots of money to launch ventures in high-traffic locales like airports. While the specialty cafe scene has grown, most expanding coffee shop companies remain concentrated in a single city. As these businesses grow, owners may eventually secure the finances needed for new projects, such as a specialty bar in an airport. But it looks like that growth needs to come first, before we see wood-panel flooring and V60s transforming the sterility of the airport environment.

A significant challenge highlighted by my airport analysis is the continued dominance of commercial cafe culture over specialty. While consumers want coffee, their preference often skew towards traditional offerings such as extra-large vanilla lattes and the like from familiar chain shops. Commercial cafes not only have the capital and business models to afford airport retail space; they also have the assurance that their products will sell—a lot.

Despite the growth of specialty in our communities, the fact is that they are not outpacing the growth of commercial coffee. Yes, your favourite specialty shop may have opened three locations in your city, including one on your former university campus, but consider how many chain cafes you pass by before reaching a specialty store. And this is even more pronounced in airports, where the urgency of the departure lounge heightens the preference for recognizable brands.

So, would you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a specialty bar at a budget airline airport? Will millions of travellers embrace your lesser-known coffee brand, or will they opt for the comfort of a familiar name after navigating the horrors of air travel?

Quality is another challenge in the airport space. When speed and customer turnover is of the essence, maintaining quality at every stage of the process becomes nigh impossible, with drinks often prepared hastily and without care. The effort that went into sourcing high-quality beans is wasted when baristas burn the milk or pay no attention to the brew that’s been left to bloom for six minutes in the corner while they prepare eight Americanos. This outcome is not inevitable, but it poses a significant problem for successfully running a specialty shop in an airport if the ‘specialty’ experience is to be maintained.

Given the costs and risks involved, it is also worth considering why people open specialty coffee shops to begin with. Counter to the profit-driven logic of Business Schools, many owners are motivated by passion and community. In my interviews with over 50 Latin American specialty coffee shop owners across Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, not a single person indicated profit as a primary motivation for opening a specialty coffee shop. While they all wanted to earn a living doing what they love, what truly drove them was their passion for coffee and the deep affection it inspires: they write books, make stickers to plaster their laptops with, and carry notebooks to journal their experiences with their favourite bean. Airport retail, unfortunately, is not conducive to a similar sense of passion and community.

Community is connected to that elusive feeling of belonging, where we feel seen and heard by others. In the anonymity of urban life, finding genuine community is hard. Specialty coffee shops, distinguished from mass chains by the unique and diverse atmospheres and generally non-corporate service structures, serve as vital spaces for community-building. They are spaces where small talk can brighten up your day, reminding you that you exist, and that you are not alone in this world.

At the airport, however, anonymity reigns. Frustration mounts as you navigate long queues, aware that you contribute to their length. You are in a rush even though your flight doesn’t start boarding for another hour—such is the nature or the airport atmosphere—and so you don’t ask the barista about the specific coffee you’re about to drink, as if she had time to tell you anyway. You become just another task in the workflow, hastily grabbing your coffee to go. This sort of experience is a far cry from what we tend to love about specialty shops—quality, connection, community, comfort, slowness. Perhaps the airport is simply antithetical to specialty, and the best we can do is to follow James Hoffmann’s advice of using airport coffee as a reminder of why we love specialty so much.

In spite of all these challenges, however, some brave souls have decided that enough is enough and are working busily to change the tide of specialty in the airport space.

Leading the way into the airport

We depend on others to enjoy many of life’s pleasures. As psychologist Nichola Raihani illustrates in her book The Social Instinct, human development fundamentally relies on cooperation, such as that which has led some people to throw caution to the wind and open up specialty outlets in airports. Here are three examples that highlight aspects of how specialty shops in airports might work.

In Colombia, Xue Café led the way in introducing specialty culture to air-travellers. Martina Hakim opened the first branch of Xue in the international airport’s departures area in Bogotá in 2014. her goal was simple: to showcase the best of Colombian coffee to international tourists, leaving them with a positive impression of the country and its coffee, and the chance to pick up a bag of specialty coffee to enjoy at home. While all the challenges I mention above also applied to Martina, she embraced them, inspiring others to join her in bringing specialty to different airports across the country, in space where one can indulge in specialty coffee as if seated at their neighbourhood coffee shop. These cafes swerve as a reminder that quality and comfort needn’t necessarily be sacrificed to the demands of airport retail.

In Colombia, we have seen the blossoming of specialty cafe culture over the past 10 years, even within airport spaces. But why is this the case? Several factors contribute to this trend. Many cafe entrepreneurs in Colombia start with substantial capital to cover the costs of airport outlets, and almost all cafe owners possess strong business acumen, allowing them to assess and tackle challenges strategically and successfully. We observe similar patterns with Café Unido in Panama City’s newly renovated airport. These entrepreneurs are willing to venture into airport zones because they understand not only start-up processes but also the importance of expansion.

In Australia, where being served bad coffee is nearly unheard of, consumer expectations for quality compel even airport coffee shops to make an effort. However, specialty cafes often have to sacrifice certain elements of what defines specialty: service (which at the airport, as many know, can sometimes be more of a slap-in-the-face experience than a handshake), community engagement, and personal connections. While these aspects may be elusive in many specialty outlets, they are almost entirely absent in airports. However, comfort can be a feature of both types of outlet, as airport cafés can provide a sense of escape from the noise and stress of travel. The Australian model has proven successful as people seek good coffee quickly while racing to their gates. Perhaps, over time, we will see more airport cafes that embody the ‘great good place’ that Ray Oldenburg once described.

To a large extent, outlets that have opened in Australian airports have had their hand forced in that the local consumption culture will not countenance poorly made, lower quality coffee as a rule. But even given this, speed of service must still be observed—understandable in a specialty market as mature as this, where speed and quality have had to develop alongside each other for decades. Laura Hurtado, co-owner of Hijamia in Medellín, Colombia, worked as a barista in one such specialty cafe in Sydney airport, and explains that there was no time for chit-chat between orders; once your shift began, you spent eight hours straight making coffees. But the coffees that came out were always of a superior quality and delivered quickly, nullifying one of the aforementioned challenges faced by the airport-based specialty cafe.

Recently, Cloud Picker from Dublin, Ireland, opened an outlet in the city’s international airport. Cloud Picker has enjoyed major success over the years at its other locations, which has gone a long way in facilitating its expansion into the airport. This case illustrates that as specialty businesses grow, so too do the opportunities for taking specialty into the sphere of the airport rise. As the industry as a whole expands, we can expect to see more specialty coffee offerings to pep us up ahead of air travel and all that comes with it.

These three examples demonstrate the possibilities of expanding the specialty outlet into the airport offering us a glimpse of hope that soon, we might be able to savour a delicious Chemex while waiting for our flight to board.

Take off, by way of a conclusion

Specialty coffee was built on a dream—a vision of a world rooted in care, transparency, fair prices, and sustainability. When these seeds were planted in the 1990s, many doubted they would ever be harvested. While the industry is far from perfect, the collective action of its pioneers turned a doubtful dream into the global standard we know today.

Bringing this culture to airports remains a new frontier. But a new wave of advocates is already pushing boundaries, challenging the ‘old regime’ of commercial coffee in some of the world’s costliest, high-traffic retail spaces. Perhaps one day specialty coffee will be so widespread that we’ll forget how hard-won it was. We won’t need Hoffmann’s advice of drinking bad coffee just to appreciate good; instead, we’ll be blissfully immersed in a world of V60s and flat whites crafted from light-roasted coffee. With brew bars in every terminal—and maybe even at the back of the plane—the wait for the ‘specialty flight’ will finally be over.