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QSR coffee brands alert: Here are the U.S. cities that love you most

U.S. consumers fork out $48 billion annually to get their coffee. But as it turns out some American cities have a little more intense love of java than others, according to some research recently completed by the site on top "Coffee Cities" nationally.

September 26, 2018 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

In the U.S. alone, consumers fork out $48 billion annually to get that well-known and loved pick-me-up, coffee, according to the personal-finance website WalletHub. But as it turns out some American cities have a little more intense love of java than others, according to some research recently completed by the site on top "Coffee Cities" nationally. 

To determine who received that caffeinated crown, WalletHub compared the 100 largest cities across 14 key indicators of a strong coffee culture. The results suggest we Americans "got it bad" when it comes to the morning jolt and that holds particularly true along the coasts, where eight of the top 10 "coffee cities" were found. The top 20 spots for a "spot o' coffee" include:

1. New York
2. Seattle     
3. San Francisco         
4. Portland, Oregon         
5. Los Angeles         
6. Washington, D.C.         
7. Chicago     
8. Miami         
9. Boston         
10. San Diego
11. Denver
12. Las Vegas 
13. Minneapolis
14. Philadelphia
15. Orlando, Florida
16. Atlanta, Georgia    
17. Austin, Texas
18. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
19. Oakland, California
20. Fremont, California

Other "fun facts" from the WalletHub data dive, include distinctions like the lowest priced city for coffee --$3.38 in Tulsa, which is less than half the cost of a bag of jo in Honolulu, where that same package of coffee would run you $8.16. 

Fremont, California — situated between  San Francisco and San Jose — has the highest average annual spending on coffee per household of $186.85. That's three times higher than in lowest spending per household city of Cleveland, Ohio, where families doled out a mere $63.06 in the name of their favorite caffeinated beverage. 

New York City, as might be expected, has the most coffee shops, coffee houses and cafés — 17.4 times more than in Laredo, Texas where they are apparently already wide awake, thank you. Often overcast or rainy Portland, Oregon, has the most coffee and tea manufacturers per square root of population) at 0.0209 to keep their people perked up on a gloomy day. That's a whopping 41.8 times more than the number of businesses making coffee and tea in the least populated cities for that industry, which as you may have predicted are the super-sunny L.A. "suburbs" of Riverside and San Bernardino, California. 

Photo: iStock

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.