In Missouri It’s Tea Over Coffee; Lattes Cost The Most

Surprise, when it comes to popping into Starbucks or any of your coffee shops or restaurants in Missouri, there's a good chance they're selling more tea than coffee.

Restaurant technology company Toast recently released their Q1 2024 Restaurant Trends Report, and in it, they look at coffee and tea trends in all 50 states, as well as restaurant wage data and overall breakfast performance. Yet, what interests me the most is Missouri's coffee and tea trends.

Toast found that in the first quarter of this year, guests across the United States paid an average of $3.08 for a cup of regular coffee, $5.14 for a cold brew, $5.46 for a latte, and $3.74 for tea. This is very good news for Missouri, as the average costs for all these items are lower than the national average.

In Missouri, on average, we pay $2.88 for a cup of regular coffee, $4.79 for cold brew, $5.34 for a latte, and $3.45 for tea. That's 20 cents less for a regular cup of coffee, 35 cents less for a cold brew, 12 cents on a latte, and 29 cents on tea.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but it certainly adds up over time, especially if you enjoy picking up a coffee every day. If you buy a regular coffee on the way to work every day, that's saving about a buck a week and about four dollars a month.

Toast's research found that in many places, tea outsells coffee, which I find very surprising. Tea also beats coffee in Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. It's surprising until you read the fine print. The tea category doesn't just include a cup of hot tea. It also counts purchases of specialty teas, iced tea, black tea, herbal tea, and green tea.

Iced tea is the game changer in this, explaining how tea beats coffee. It's a very popular cold beverage that has been around forever and seems popular almost everywhere, especially in the South, Texas, and places where it's warm to hot in the summers and mild in the winters.

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Utah and Nevada prefer coffee. I'd assume coffee beats tea in Nevada because of the 24-hour nature of Vegas and probably most of the cities in Nevada.  The states' coffee "wins" tend to be north. Places like Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, and the states in the Northeast, such as New Jersey, New York, Massachusettes, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. In other words, coffee tends to "win" in places where it can be pretty darn cold and stay cold.

So yeah, tea beats coffee in Missouri, thanks to iced and green tea. Yet regardless of what you're ordering at the coffee place, the good news is you're paying between 10 and 35 cents less than the national average for your caffeine fix.