When you’re reading Coffee Review, you may find yourself wondering who else is in the virtual room with you. Who else is reading a report about the fine points of a processing method or origin, and what are they thinking? And what coffees are they drinking?
These questions are very important to us at Coffee Review, of course. Not only do we want satisfied readers who keep coming back to read us again and again, but we also harbor a basic human curiosity about who might be reading our reports and reviews and why.
We have two main ways we learn about our readers. First is the broad and impersonal data on Google Analytics and our own server logs. These sources anonymously track who visits CoffeeReview.com and provides aggregate data on where our readers are located, how they found us, which web pages they visit, and so. Second, we periodically conduct surveys of our readers to gather more demographic data about them and their coffee-drinking and coffee-reading expectations, habits and preferences. We completed such a survey in early 2024, and share some of what we learned here, along with some aggregate data from Google.
The Basic Data
In 2023, Coffee Review welcomed more than one million readers from 218 countries and territories. Coffee Review ratings reached more than 100 million consumers through our worldwide network of digital, print, and marketing channels. Our readers will drink over a billion cups of coffee and consume more than 30 million pounds of coffee beans.
Two-thirds of our visitors are from North America. We have readers in all 50 U.S. states and every major metropolitan area in the country. The top ten countries by readership are as follows:
- United States
- Taiwan
- Canada
- Philippines
- United Kingdom
- China
- Australia
- India
- Malaysia
- Thailand
The Survey Results
Over 400 readers from around the world participated in our 2024 online survey. The United States is home to 88% of them.
We found that Coffee Review readers overall have high levels of education and income. Of Coffee Review readers, 74% report having a college degree, which is roughly double the rate in the overall U.S. population. Readers’ average annual income is $156,000, which is more than double the U.S. medium household income of about $75,000 in 2022.
On average, our readers report drinking 2.9 servings of coffee per day, which is in line with norms for U.S. coffee drinkers overall. Coffee Review readers report spending an average of $20.60 per pound for coffee beans.
Readership by U.S. State
For many years, we’ve analyzed our website traffic data to better understand where interest in gourmet coffee is highest, at least based on Coffee Review per capita readership.
As we have noted in the past, a state’s population is the biggest driver of website traffic. Not surprisingly, if one just looks at total CoffeeReview.com traffic, the top four states for readership are California, Texas, Florida, and New York, which are also the most populous states.
Of course, one would expect California to have more readers than Hawai’i just based on the large difference in population, nearly 40 million versus 1.5 million, respectively. So in the following figures, we normalized the traffic data for population to calculate per capita readership, which is a better gauge of the level of interest in coffee.
The top 10 states by per capita readership in 2023-24:
- Hawai’i
- Washington
- Virginia
- Oregon
- Minnesota
- Montana
- Maine
- Vermont
- California
- Wyoming
Hawai’i Tops the List Again
Most of the states on the list aren’t surprises. Hawai’i has been #1 or #2 on the list every time we’ve tracked per capita readership. As we’ve noted in the past, when you consider that Hawai’i is the only state that produces significant quantities of coffee, it stands to reason that a lot of people have an interest in coffee news and reviews.
Washington, Oregon, and California are famous for their strong coffee cultures and long histories of roasting and consuming high quality coffees. Minnesota, Maine, and Vermont are northern, cold-weather states, which could drive coffee interest and readership, especially in winter.
Montana and Wyoming are also northern states but, in the past, prior to COVID, they tended to appear well down the list. It’s likely that COVID-era demographic shifts played our role in readership increases. The local presence of many high quality coffee roasters in Montana (especially Revel Coffee and RamsHead Coffee Roasters) and Wyoming (JackRabbit Java and Mystic Monk Coffee) are likely driving interest in specialty coffees.
It’s not clear why Virginia would be so high on the list but there is no shortage of high quality coffee roasters – Roadmap, Ironclad, Index, Pinup, Merge — that are both serving and creating an enthusiastic specialty coffee scene.
If you are wondering what state is last on the list this year, it is Louisiana. We’re not sure why.
