Twitter¹, on the other hand, suggested that it was Costa Coffee who were going to put an 11oz flat White on the menu in the new year.

This won’t be a surprise to some people who’ve been predicting this for the last couple of months.²

If this is indeed true I look forward to the many and varied reactions to this. I hope that most independents, especially those in London, greet the decision with relief.

Recent reading³ has really reminded me that in any competitive environment, be it selling coffee or evolutionary biology, any competitive advantage gained (through mutation or innovation) is temporary. Everyone caught up, either because they copied or because the pool of competitors shrank to only those with an old advantage.

Innovating just the once is fine in the short term, but it needs to continue to be a successful long term strategy.

The flat white⁴ is not a magic bullet that can help recover declining coffee sales. The brands are increasingly aware of a new breed of independents and are looking to react. By picking on the flat white they will have made the classic mistake of confusion correlation with causation.  Lots of the best shops in the UK offer a flat white (correlation) but they are not successful because they serve flat whites (causation).  This is an apparently easy to mistake to make, going by the last broadsheet article about the flat white.  Independents know that it is a myriad of things that make them better than the chains, and should be relieved that despite the scrutiny the chains are likely to miss the key factors that give them an advantage.

That said – it should remind independents that while they still have the advantage it won’t last for long and that they have the attention and the interest of the largest coffee operators in the UK.  For the coffee-quality focused amongst us to be truly successful we have to constantly keep pushing forwards, and never give them the chance to catch up.

Hopefully there will be some official comment from either Starbucks or Costa that I can link to in the next couple of days.  Thoughts on this from all of you would be very welcome.

UPDATE: So it has been confirmed that Costa are putting them on the menu.  I haven’t found any mention of Starbucks anywhere.  (I did twitter at the UK MD but haven’t had a response yet.)

UPDATE: Starbucks have now also confirmed that they will be serving the flat white in London as of next week, and across the UK from January.

UPDATE: The broadsheet article mentioned above can now be found here.  Eric (who I am not sure really claims to be the first man serving flat whites in London) made me chuckle with his comment.  It is nice to see some explanation from Starbucks on why they are doing it.  I am more curious about the apparent customer demand for it – I would imagine the kind of people who would want a flat white wouldn’t head to Starbucks to try and get them to make something off menu.  Will Costa be grumpy they got beaten to the punch?

1. Sources here and here, as well as a couple of DMs
2. Most notably and repeatedly Ian Boughton in his Coffee House magazine
3. The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
4. essentially a small, strong latte

This is probably of interest to anyone who has competed or watched competitions since 2005.

In some competitions the La Marzoccos used were GB5 and FB80 AV machines – meaning they have a line of buttons linked to volumetric controls.  More recently a lot of machines just had one big on/off button.

Anyway – I remember back in 2005 in Seattle and in other barista competitions that during a competitors set the machines just seemed to switch off.  Everyone was very confused how a barista could have done this as you have to push and hold an on/off button for at least 3 (or maybe 5) seconds.

A few months ago Matt Buckley at Milk Bar showed me this weird little thing (he didn’t want to be in the video).  Here is an explanation:

FB80 & GB5 software bug from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

If anyone else can verify this bug I’d be interested/grateful and also I’d like to know if it affects 2 groups too.  Comment away!