No matter why people are drinking it, cold foam doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. “It’s all part of the layered beverage trend.” Stratified layers of foam in coffee or cheese in tea make for a more interesting photo than a regular old iced tea or coffee might unlike the candy-colored drinks of two years ago, they also seem like something an actual coffee drinker might like to consume.

“I think it’s purely Instagram,” Eli Tea founder and Eater Young Gun Elias Majid says. For non-coffee drinkers, there’s even a Nitro Lemon Fog with nitrogenated peach tea and a lemon-spiced cold foam topping.īut why is cold foam suddenly so popular? Cynically, social media might still play a part. There are now at least 12 different iterations of cold brew on Starbucks menu, including cold brew with cold foam, cold brew with cream cold foam, nitro cold brew with sweet cream, nitro cold brew with cascara cold foam, cold brew with cascara cold foam, and last but not least, pumpkin cream cold brew. Seemingly all at once, Starbucks has become all about iced coffee drinks layered with floating barges of chilled, whipped milk topping. But today, these desserts in a cup and glorified hot milkshakes have given way to a new dominant category on the Starbucks menu: coffee with “cold foam.”

The Starbucks menu was once dominated by espresso drinks with complicated ingredients: In the mid-1990s, stores were bombarded with promos for blended, frozen Frappuccino drinks topped with swirls of whipped cream more recently, purely stunt-flavored Frapps ( unicorn! zombie! crystal ball!) dominated the news cycle and social media feeds.

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