New Advert Ft. Wallis Day Makes Iced Coffee Positively Steamy
While many of us in the Northern Hemisphere spent last weekend picking pumpkins or raking leaves, coffee aficionados from around the world instead descended upon the New York Coffee Festival. Held October 6–8, the trade show brings together coffee experts to try their hand at cupping, brewing, or latte art; coffee purveyors to learn more about, say, innovations in packaging or the emergence of cascara; and coffee enthusiasts who want to spend the weekend celebrating everyone’s favorite pick-me-up.
Just in time for the festival, the Better Food Foundation launched a steamy new advertisement starring part-time New Yorker Wallis Day. The native Londoner is an actress and model who has appeared in a number of watercooler-worthy TV programmes, from long-running soaps (Channel 4’s Hollyoaks) to the DC cinematic universe (the CW’s Batwoman). Day made a splash as Superman’s villainous grandmother Nyssa in SyFy’s Krypton and starred as Gigi earlier this year in the NYC-set Netflix original Sex/Life.
The ad, which is hitting tens of thousands of mobile phones in NYC and London over the next two weeks, is a nod to BFF’s “Change Is Brewing” campaign that celebrates oatmilk as the global coffee market’s emerging new norm, from Shanghai to Hollywood to New York to merry old England. As seen above, the advert features a bikini-clad Wallis Day lounging on a yacht and holding an oatmilk latte. Text reads, “Whether you like your coffee icy cold or steaming hot, we can all agree on one thing… oatmilk, by default.”
Being under 30, it’s little surprise that Wallis Day takes her coffee with oatmilk. Young coffee drinkers are increasingly straying from dairy and its dismal environmental toll, as confirmed by a 2022 British survey which found that half of Gen Z reported feeling ashamed to order cow’s milk in front of peers. Other research estimates that consumers in their 20s are drinking five times as much plant-based milk as older generations.
In response to the skyrocketing demand for plantmilk, iconic coffee chains like Stumptown, Blue Bottle, and Flash Coffee are not only ditching the upcharge for plantmilks but are actually making oat the automatic choice with every order. Offering plantmilk by default is an enormously powerful strategy: New data analyzed by BFF reveals that University College London’s Gordon’s Cafe decreased its dairy purchasing by about a quarter after implementing an oatmilk default — with oatmilk purchases more than doubling.
Making coffee DefaultVeg nudges consumers toward plant-based bevvies, making it easier for coffeeshops to lower their environmental impact while still giving customers what they want. Each latte switched from dairy to oat saves two showers’ worth of water, and every three lattes saves the same emissions as driving one mile in a car. Many cafes report that half of their customers already order drinks with oatmilk, so flipping to an oatmilk default makes sense from a business perspective.
If you want to make your local coffeeshop DefaultVeg, contact us! This year we’ve worked with students to pilot oatmilk defaults in two different cafes. Could yours be next?
