Blending Trending: tracing the fall and rise of blending in the specialty coffee market

Blending isn’t unique to coffee. Most commodities have long been cut, mixed, or alloyed; allowing producers to navigate production hurdles or meet buyer specifications.

A common trend runs through these practices: when one or more products are blended into the original, it’s typically done so to reduce costs and increase financial gains at the expense of the product’s quality. Your petrol is refined and mixed to have you run out sooner; bartenders water down drinks to have you order more; and premium products like wine or whiskey are often mixed with lower quality fillers to stretch margins further.  The most scandalous example might be the 1985 Austrian diethylene-glycol wine scandal – where Austria’s wine exports collapsed overnight after finding anti-freeze had been added to create richer, fuller-bodied wines without using the expensive late-harvest grapes.

Given this association between blending and diminished quality, it's no surprise that as industry niches grow more quality-focused, they often distance themselves from blending. For premium wine and whiskeys, emphasis rests on provenance, purity, and single-vineyard or single-cask bottlings. Specialty coffee followed a similar path: ushering in an era of single-origin espressos (SOEs), microlots, and an ever-growing vocabulary around estate names, varieties, and processing methods.

Here, we explore the past and present relationships between coffee roasters and blending. In the quality oriented market, how have these relationships changed over time? And, can the practice of blending be reconciled with the pursuit of uncompromising quality?

To help figure it out, we conducted a survey with 35 global coffee roasteries identifying as specialty to examine their perspectives on the changing utility and marketability of coffee blends. Let's get straight into the mix. 

One of the many cuppings involved in designing the Exemplar blends (Belfast, March 2025)

First Wave (c. pre 1960s)

Unfortunately, our dataset doesn’t cover any coffee roasteries in this bracket ( ✨time machine required ✨ ). However, it's apparent that blending was a ubiquitous practice not through choice but necessity. Commercial coffee consumption had boomed in the early twentieth century. The advent of the espresso machine and the commercial coffee roaster at the break of the century (c. 1900 - 1910) meant that roasters could scale their operations rapidly - provided, of course, they had the beans to roast.

This wasn’t always the case. Global supply chains were fraught with infrastructure problems, and a series of disruptive wars worldwide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that consistency, not quality, was often the deciding factor in coffee procurement for commercially scaling roasteries.

To navigate supply chain issues, coffee was often blended – either at origin (as raw coffee blends), or in consuming countries by roasters – to ensure consistent supplies, which were less about the specifics, and more focused on providing a uniform experience. 

In colonial Kenya, single estate coffee was prioritised as a means of increasing crop value for British settler farmers, but during wartime the colonial government commandeered coffee supplies and ordered the ‘pooling’ of all coffee. Under the pooled system, estate marks had no effect on marketing. Instead, all of Kenya’s coffee was classified ‘without knowledge of estate marks’ and was subsequently pooled in a single classification system before being sold in bulked consignments of specific classifications. In this system, a consistent supply was explicitly valued above quality. 

Consuming countries strategised consistent caffeine supplies in different ways. In Spain after the civil war, coffee was blended with sugar before roasting to make torrefacto, a means of preserving coffee for long periods of time when fresh imports were infrequent. In France, Holland, and then America, chicory became a resident blend component for coffee.

Blends therefore assisted pioneers in the mass commercialisation of roasted coffee; giving roasters the ability to market consistent products that they could sell year-round without fear of supplies dwindling or becoming too expensive.

One account, that of Laubender in 1806, lists 46 separate roastable substitutes and blending additives for coffee in Europe when supplies were dwindling, including some rather surprising and horrifyingly noteworthy features: chicory, rye, barley, acorn, fig, apple, and asparagus. Some of these probably dictated the final cup flavour more so than coffee, but the point is they weren’t added initially through preference, but as a necessity to stretch a small, expensive and high-demand good to as many consumers as possible.

Clarke, writing in 1987 concludes that ‘today, these special coffee additives have mostly lost their former importance.’ Rightly so; coffee production and consumption had by then entered what we would later dub the second wave.

The Second Wave (c. 1960s - 2000s)

Cue Starbucks (or rather, Starbucks queues).

The second wave crashed in North America and Europe in the 1960s when new coffee chains rapidly expanded, competing to become King of the Hill in each city, office block, and home. Brand names became the name of the game; and a brand’s worth became synonymous with their blend.

Assessments at the time seemed to agree on the prevalence and importance of blending. Schapira in the 1975 Book of Coffee and Tea wrote:

‘The average consumer generally chooses from among a wide array of these coffee blends, each identified only by brand name… As time went on, facts about blends ceased to be forthcoming; the brand names were intended to stand on their own and for the blend's quality. The coffee drinker today is told that one brand is richer, another is coffee-er, while yet another is "good to the last drop." He is given virtually no information by which to judge the validity or at least the probable validity of these claims.’

Schapira was sneering at blends long before it was cool. 

Coffee brands didn’t aim to establish their identities around specific origins or producers, but focused on building identities through blend flavour profiles unique to their brand. We can see the dominance of blending in the oldest segment of our respondents, with 6/7 roasteries in the category answering positively. More than 50% of respondents in this category (15 years +) also roast more than 2000kg per week, and a common theme in their philosophies on blending was that ‘it allows us to achieve consistency across larger volumes’. Meaning that while the components of the blend might change individually, the blend itself should remain consistent in terms of brewing recipe and flavour profile. Ideally, these roasteries’ networks of wholesale and home-brewing customers shouldn’t notice a difference.

Survey respondents from roasteries of 15+ years old said:

“Blends are typically the preference for wholesale customers, whereas a larger percentage of home customers prefer single origins.”

“We have always offered blends as part of our core range for clients who are less interested in specialty coffee. Our higher-end microlot coffees are typically for our specialty clients. There's a clear divide in how we market and sell.”

“While single origins are our pride and joy, blends are our bread and butter. We wish it wasn't that way!”

“The cornerstone of our business, blending ensures we can bring our customers the same coffee month-to-month.”

Blending Practices by Roastery Age (Data collected Nov. 2024 - April 2025)

The Third Wave (c. 2010s - 2020s)

The advent of the Third Wave saw an emerging approach to coffee sourcing and roasting, which was naturally difficult to reconcile with blending. The second wave was characterised by rapidly expanding coffee businesses with aims of uniformity and consistency across vast locational and cultural settings, and blending was one tool they used to do this. The Third Wave has been about the opposite; small-batch, hand-roasted, microlot, one-of-a-kind coffee. Superficially, it seemed like blending had very few friends in the specialty camp. 

Data from our respondents correlates with this. Proportionally, less roasteries founded between 5-9 years ago were blending coffee. In their comments on blending, a preference of focus on “single origin” was mentioned by three roasters, while another mentioned how blending didn’t resonate with their business identity. This era is marked by a focus on coffees from single estates and producers. Focusing on ‘direct trade’ and ‘relationship coffee’, specialty coffees sought to champion the names of producers; committing to coffee from the same people year after year, promoting the individual lots and their characteristics to become a strong component in the roastery brand and product range. Many roasteries create categories on their offer lists specifically designed for single origins with specific traits to represent.

Blending Practices by Roast Volume (Data collected Nov. 2024 - April 2025)

However, it’s interesting to see that while Third Wave roasteries typically prioritise single origin over blending, some still wanted the impact of having a branded flavour achieved through blending. There is a strong correlation between the size of a roastery’s output and their likelihood of blending, with every roastery producing over 2000kg per week saying yes to blending. Similar to what was mentioned previously, it’s clear that blending offers many benefits to roasteries operating at scale. And for specialty roasteries, these cost and consistency advantages outweigh any customer-perceived negativity relating to blending.

THE FUTURE: BLENDING TRENDING (?)

Recently, it’s evident that quality oriented blending is having a bit of a renaissance. Our sample pool indicates that more roasteries founded recently are open to having blends on their menu. More than 50% of these roasteries are still relatively small in output – roasting less than 500kg per week, so what’s the cause of this renewed focus on blending?

We believe much of the answer is in the current coffee-buying climate for specialty roasters. In 2025, green coffee prices hit all-time highs, and a number of factors are contributing to a shrinking availability of green bean options and availability.

Roasters typically purchase coffee from importers by one of two means: (i) pre-contracting harvests – which involves forecasting required quantities ahead of time, or (ii) ordering coffees from spot (ie. coffees already landed and stored in warehouses close to the roastery). Many smaller roasteries have conventionally opted for the latter. Spot coffee gives roasters more flexibility with quantity and allows them to order as and when they need. It’s a hand-to-mouth form of purchasing which can be more reactive, requires less planning and strategising in terms of cashflow and coffee arrival times, and most importantly allows smaller roasters to build pallets made up of sacks of multiple single origin coffees. Recently however, spot coffee availability is dwindling. Sharp rises in fresh coffee prices has meant that existing spot coffees have been snapped up by savvy buyers - forcing increasing roasters to pre-contracting buying systems. With these systems, it's often most cost-efficient to commit to more of one type of coffee than to spread buying thin across multiple lots.  

Systemic changes at a production level also seem to point towards lesser variation in the lots available. The looming threat of EUDR regulations may mean that the current throngs of coffee options we have from small, single producers may be rendered obsolete in value of larger estate coffees which easily comply with the new regulations.

As options dwindle and the C-price rises forces all coffee to become increasingly expensive, many roasters are looking for ways to keep their wholesale customers appeased with pricing while maintaining quality. Blending offers an avenue to bring interesting coffees to clients without suffering the price hikes coffee experiences individually. This trifecta of factors is pushing roasters to be more creative with options available in order to maintain artisanal approaches at a time when supplies are drying up and becoming more standardised and generic. Blending offers a way to diversify and place a stamp on a product. 

After adopting blending, roasters are also beginning to see how it can support buying systems introduced during the Third Wave era. As Lance Hendrick has recently pointed out –

‘A lot of roasteries are picking up on this idea of committing to producers where they buy their lots year-in-year-out regardless of the quality. There are a lot of things out of a producer’s control - they could have frost damage, insect infestations… but you could find a way to put these coffees into a blend so you’re not wasting the coffee and you can still buy at a higher price from this farm you're committed to.’ (Lance Hendrick, Single Origins Vs. Blends)

All signs point to a bright future for blends.

The proof is in the pudding. If blends are good enough for the world competitors’ stage, and roasters seem to be headed for a buying market with less readily available options and more urgency to diversify their products, then maybe it's long overdue for the specialty market to wake up from its single origin hangover and bow before the blend.