London Coffee Festival Sold Out

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00][music] >> Last week I went to London Coffee Festival for the third year, and while last year definitely went down a bit in my estimation, I wasn't prepared for how bad it would be this year. I just want to be really clear up front, I love coffee festivals, I love the community, and I want LCF to be great, but I think the honest reality is that the London Coffee Festival has become something that doesn't really represent specialty coffee anymore. Walking in this year, the very first thing I saw, right near the front entrance, was an M&S cafe stand. That's Marks & Spencer's, the supermarket. To me, that was a massive red flag waving in my face going, "This is not about specialty coffee anymore."

[00:00:37]But as I walked around the first floor, or second floor, I'm not too sure, it's a bit of a maze in there, I swear I could count the actual coffee-related booths on one or two hands, which I'll show on the screen right now. Most of the stands were matcha, chocolate, chai, pastries, oat milk, payment systems, cafe POS software, you name it. I would say there were more cafe-adjacent products than there were actual specialty coffee. Now, LCF themselves have actually leaned into this. This year was the first time they had an official headline matcha sponsor, OMG [music] Tea. They've publicly framed this as the cafe becoming a specialty drinks shop, rather than a coffee shop.

[00:01:15]And look, the cafe industry is changing.

[00:01:17]Plant-based milk is like 35% of all the milk volume in cafes in the UK, >> [music] >> matcha is huge, cold brew has its own dedicated competition now. These trends are changing what people buy at cafes.

[00:01:28]But there's a difference between a coffee festival that acknowledges those trends and a coffee festival where coffee is now just a small section of what's being called a coffee festival.

[00:01:38]There's a reason that this is happening, and it's not malicious, it's just money.

[00:01:41]The cost of a stand at LCF has gone up [music] significantly. While you could get a tiny table for a couple hundred in a back room where nobody will find you, if you want to get a stand in the Roasters Village, it's going to set you back around two and a half grand.

[00:01:54]>> [music] >> So I calculated how many books would I need to sell if I made a stand to sell my Brew Ledger and actually break even, and it [music] was 282 books. Here's an AI image of how much space 282 Brew [music] Ledgers takes up.

[00:02:07]So, a small or even medium-size specialty roaster will really struggle to break even with the tiny margins on roasted coffee coming to a show like this, plus paying [music] for their stand, their staff, and their transport and food. They would have to sell many hundreds, if not thousands, of bags of coffee, which is just not possible at the show. And the only way to get a return would be to [music] at least get a few long-term wholesale accounts, which is going to be a real struggle when you're literally surrounded by other coffee companies competing for the exact same thing. If you're a roaster who exhibited at LCF, please let me know in the comments if you made any money from exhibiting at the show, but I won't hold my breath.

[00:02:43]>> [music] >> So, if you're a small roaster doing 50 to 100 kilos a week, the maths just doesn't work. You can't justify several thousand pounds for a stand when the exposure just isn't translating to enough new wholesale accounts or even direct sales. The people who can afford the stands are the bigger players, the matcha brands, the oat milk companies, the payment processors, companies that aren't selling a single origin Colombian at 12 pounds a bag. They're selling B2B services or commodity products with much higher margins. The more the floor fills up with non-specialty exhibitors, the less reason a serious specialty drinker or buyer has to go, which reduces the audience that small roasters actually want to meet, which makes it even harder to justify a stand. [music] So, they don't come, and the floor at LCF gets even less specialty focused. The other thing worth mentioning here is that LCF used to be organized by Allegra Events, who [music] were specifically a coffee events company. In 2022, it got taken over by William Reed, who are a much bigger digital publisher across the food and drinks industry. [music] Their first show was LCF 2023, the first one I went to after moving home from Japan. Maybe there were just more of the same kind of people booking that event cuz I genuinely enjoyed the first year I went in 2023, but now in 2026, the change is very, very visible.

[00:03:54]>> [music] >> Now, I want to be fair to the specialty guys who did show up because there were some genuinely great stands this year that deserve a shout-out. I really enjoyed Terra Firma Coffee who were doing some really great coffee and the people on the stand really knew their stuff. Brew & Brew Dealers from Malaga were there, too, one of my favorite roasters in Spain and lovely, lovely people. And Coffee Buff near the Latte Art Live booth was phenomenal. Their anaerobic natural Ethiopian [music] was delicious. Latte Art Live was also a lot of fun. I threw down against the UK Latte Art champion, barista Benji, with a peggy paw and I think I was the only person to lose to him despite him having big handicaps. And there was an interesting thing happening just outside the festival itself, which is that some exhibitors are now skipping the show entirely and doing pop-ups in nearby coffee shops during the LCF weekend instead. [music] I went to check out the Fellow One machine at a shop nearby and the experience was actually better than most of what was happening inside the festival. [music] It's quieter, more focused. You could actually have a proper conversation with the people behind the product and practice making some lattes.

[00:04:48]>> [music] >> The machines come a long way since I saw it last year and I'm just waiting for them to send me a final retail version for a review. But after I'd seen a few friends in the industry and done the rounds, I just felt like there really wasn't much to keep me there. I left earlier than I have in previous years, just going for the one day, and I had that slightly hollow feeling you get when something you used to look forward to has changed and you didn't quite realize it until you were standing in the middle of it. If I compare it to other coffee shows, it's even worse. The Brighton Coffee Festival last year was much smaller, obviously, but it was clearly intentionally a specialty coffee affair. The roasters who were there were properly invested in being there. The conversations were better because I was talking with the company owners and the roasters, not paid expo baristas who aren't connected to the product. The coffee was much better and the vibe was more kind of nerdy, enthusiastic, slightly chaotic kind of energy that good coffee events always have. And the Madrid Coffee Fest this February was just on another level. There were so many specialty roasters that I genuinely couldn't get round to all of them in a single day. I had to go back for a few hours before my flight and do another day just to check out some of the bits I missed. The whole event was buzzing with this excitement about where specialty coffee is going in Spain, what new producers were doing, what new processing methods being tested, [music] and all of that stuff. And the difference is that those shows were still primarily for coffee people. LCF has drifted into being a cafe trends or hospitality business show [music] that happens to have some coffee in it. Those are different things and they're for different audiences and I'm just not in the audience that they're focusing on now. If you watch this channel, you probably aren't either. I really hope someone in the UK steps up and creates a proper specialty coffee festival to fill the gap LCF has left. There's always London Excel if someone wants to go big and make a show that really caters to the specialty crowd. The demand is clearly here and quite a few of the coffee people I spoke to at the show and afterwards had the same opinion as I do.

[00:06:37]The Coffee Masters competition is still really cool. Latte Art Live is great.

[00:06:41]There are still great people there and I don't want to criticize those who genuinely care about specialty coffee and driving the industry forward.

[00:06:48]>> [music] >> It's just that LCF is not really for me anymore and I don't think I'll be going next year. But, what do you think?

[00:06:54][music] If you went this year, did you have the same feeling or do you think I'm being too harsh? And if you've been to a coffee shop recently in another country that you think is doing [music] it right, please drop it in the comments cuz I'd like to start planning trips around the good ones. And if you want to support the channel so I can keep burning every bridge in the coffee industry so I never get paid work again, you can buy my Brew Ledger from the link in the description. It's on Amazon with Prime delivery in 13 countries, lots of really positive reviews, and every copy sold keeps this channel alive. Thank you so much for watching, you wonderfully over-caffeinated people, and I'll see you on the next one.