The Hyperreality of Specialty Coffee

In 2023, a new company called LAP Coffee opened in Germany. It was venture capital-funded and tech-focused, with small-footprint stores and a strong emphasis on branding and specialty aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, it quickly expanded. Today, LAP—which stands for “Life Among People”—has 15 locations in Berlin and four in Munich, with more to come in Hamburg. It has garnered much criticism from Berlin’s specialty coffee scene, as well as praise from those who see it as a step forward for coffee in the city.

If LAP’s approach sounds familiar, that’s because it is uncannily similar to that of Blank Street Coffee. Blank Street is also a VC-backed, tech-forward brand with small-footprint stores and a big social media presence. It first took New York City by storm a few years ago, and has since spread to Boston, Washington DC, and overseas to the U.K. 

Both brands emphasise affordability and high-quality coffee, but that isn’t their only draw. They also explicitly co-opt the aesthetics and language of third-wave coffee, from their minimalist cafe interiors to their menus and curated Instagram feeds. 

China’s Luckin Coffee, although on a slightly bigger scale, is another example of a well-funded coffee chain utilising the signifiers of specialty coffee—it began selling a Gesha coffee in 2024, and even employs ex-World Barista Champions as consultants and brand ambassadors. In India, brands like First Coffee and AbCoffee have raised millions in investment to pursue a similar low-cost, tech-first approach, all with a specialty veneer.

These companies are buzzy, they’re well-funded, and they’re taking over. But as they continue to proliferate, they feel less tethered to the specialty coffee scene they want to engulf and more self-referential, increasingly taking their cues and inspiration from each other.

Collectively, they exemplify the postmodern French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra: copies that no longer have an original. Today, they exist alongside other unreal phenomena, from Starbucks’ roastery theme parks to social-media-born coffee micro-trends. The result, to follow Baudrillard’s theory to its endpoint, is a coffee scene that feels more hyperreal than real.

Pumpkin Spice Simulacra

A “simulacrum” is simply an imitation or representation of something. The concept goes back at least as far as Plato, who, in his allegory of the cave, compares the truth of the sun to the simulations of reality that are the shadows on the cave wall. 

In his 1981 book, “Simulacra and Simulation”, Baudrillard argues that modern society has replaced reality and meaning with signs and symbols. Our lives are dominated by mass media and technology, which become more important than, and often replace, actual reality. “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”, he writes. (And he developed the theory decades before smartphones and social media!)

In the book, Baudrillard describes four phases of simulacra. (This helpful video essay from Magdalen Rose, which uses the pumpkin spice latte to explain his theory, is a good and apt resource.)

As she notes, the first phase is what Baudrillard calls “the reflection of a profound reality”. This would be an actual pumpkin. The second phase “masks and denatures a profound reality”. This is pumpkin pie—it contains pumpkin, but it has been altered for a new purpose.

The third phase “masks the absence of a profound reality”, in the form of a pumpkin spice latte. In many cases, there’s no actual pumpkin in a PSL, just the spices we associate with pumpkin pie. It is a copy without an original. 

The fourth phase is illustrated by pumpkin spice latte-flavoured coffee creamer: It has “no relation to any reality whatsoever”, as Baudrillard wrote. It is designed to taste like the coffee drink, not the pumpkin nor even the pie. It is completely detached from anything real, and thus becomes “its own pure simulacrum”.

Copies of Coffee 

Coffee’s third wave had several key signifiers: a focus on quality, on customer service, on provenance and respect for the farmer, and on craft. These elements were largely a rejection of  coffee’s second wave, which was dominated by chains like Starbucks and Peet’s. Back in 2003, when coffee professional Trish Rothgeb first described the “third wave”, she called it “a reaction to those who want to automate and homogenize Specialty Coffee”.

The term “specialty coffee” itself is more specific, although it has also evolved. The Specialty Coffee Association used to define it in a strictly quantifiable way, as a coffee that scored 80 or more points on a 100-point scale. Later, the organisation broadened the definition, and specialty became “a coffee or coffee experience that is recognized for its distinctive attributes, resulting in a higher value within the marketplace”.

Eventually both this approach, and the associated aesthetics of specialty coffee shops, broke containment. Seemingly every cafe began featuring the same visual cues, including subway tiles, industrial lighting, and La Marzocco espresso machines. 

As Kyle Chayka wrote in his 2016 story for The Verge, “Welcome to AirSpace”, this look became something that could be easily replicated and exported around the globe. “It’s not that these generic cafes are part of global chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee, with designs that spring from the same corporate cookie cutter”, he said. “Rather, they have all independently decided to adopt the same faux-artisanal aesthetic”.

This ubiquity ultimately became something cringe, something to laugh at: McDonald’s made an ad in 2017 specifically making fun of “the hipster barista”—a concept that, as Ashley Rodriguez from Boss Barista pointed out, never even really existed.

As this aesthetic spread, it also became increasingly detached from the founding credo of specialty coffee. I would argue that startups like Blank Street, LAP, and others that have harnessed this look function as simulacra: They are mimicking the trappings of third-wave or specialty coffee in order to attract customers, but their approach isn’t based on anything concrete. They are copies without an original.

Where once startups would mimic the coolest independent coffee businesses, this latest iteration instead looks to other, similar brands. Daily Coffee News reports that Blank Street’s founders were inspired by VC-backed quick-service chains like Indonesia’s Kopi Kenangan and Heytea from China. China’s Cotti Coffee, meanwhile, was started by two former Luckin executives, and has been described as a clone of the fast-growing chain. 

As the image of specialty coffee has been copied, and those copies then copied at scale, we find ourselves moving ever further from Baudrillard’s first phase of profound reality. But as widespread as these chains are now, they weren’t the first to insert this sense of simulation into contemporary coffee culture.

Starbucks As Simulacrum

If you’re talking about simulacra in coffee, you can’t avoid Starbucks. Take the multinational’s high-end Reserve Roastery locations, which are essentially coffee theme parks (interestingly, Disneyland was another preoccupation of Baudrillard’s). These cavernous, over-designed buildings are supposed to mimic specialty roasteries, but are really ornate showpieces funded by a billion-dollar brand. This is an example of Baudrillard’s second phase of simulacra: a distortion or misrepresentation of the original image, something he called “an evil appearance”.

Then there’s Stealth Starbucks. In the late 2000s, the chain designed unbranded stores to mimic local, independent cafes. They were “learning environments”—or “local-washing”, depending on your viewpoint—and additional examples of second-phase simulacra.

Finally, and maybe most interestingly, Starbucks has made recent attempts to reverse course from its Luckin-esque quick-service, tech-friendly model—again, attempting to copy something that was itself a copy. Now Starbucks intends, it says, to recapture its soul as a “third place” community gathering spot. But as I argued in my piece on the subject, Starbucks never really represented the third place at all.

According to sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term, third places were supposed to be non-commoditised. What Starbucks created was instead a simulation of community and belonging, much like how Disneyland’s Main Street, USA is a romanticisation—and thus a simulacrum—of a typical Midwest town. In its attempts to become more “real”, Starbucks is merely shifting from one simulacrum to another.

The Hyperreality of Specialty Coffee

Baudrillard argued that the fourth phase of simulacra eventually leads to “hyperreality”, which philosophy professor Douglas Kellner described as a universe “in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life”.

In essence, Baudrillard theorises that because reality has by and large been replaced by simulacra, we are in fact living in a simulation. (Not surprisingly, his work was cited as inspiration for the 1999 film “The Matrix”, which features both a physical copy of his book and a direct quote put into the mouth of Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. Baudrillard, it turned out, wasn’t a fan.)

As the critical theory professor Dino Felluga describes it, Baudrillard illustrated the loss of distinction between reality and simulacra via a number of phenomena. Take media culture, which, through commercials and television (and now social media), has completely abstracted our relationship to consumption.

Consider the way that social media trends spill out into everyday life, and into coffee culture. Companies rush to incorporate whatever is going viral on TikTok in their menus; cafes design their spaces to look good on an Instagram grid. “As algorithms shape which content we consume on our feeds”, Chayka wrote in 2016, “we all learn to desire the same things, which often happens to involve austere interiors, reclaimed wood, and Edison bulbs”.

And what about the actual coffee? “As the things we use are increasingly the product of complex industrial processes,” Felluga explains, “we lose touch with the underlying reality of the goods we consume”. He gives the example of coffee consumers who don’t even know that their drink derives from a plant. 

Coffee culture in 2025 so often feels somehow detached—order through an app, pick up at the drive-through, avoid eye contact with the barista while you skip the tip option on the screen. Take a photo of the drink you ordered because you saw it on social media, share that photo to your followers. Drink it without much thought, because your physical experience of it is less important than how it resonates in virtual spaces. 

For an industry that once prided itself on first-person immediacy and communal experience, what is the consequence of such disconnected hyperreality? What do we lose when our relationship to coffee as an agricultural product, or to coffee shops as places where we go to be together, is obscured?

Baudrillard might have been pessimistic about our ability to escape hyperreality, but that doesn't mean we have to unquestioningly accept a coffee culture composed of simulacra and social media hype. We can still choose to prioritise physical experience over Instagram engagement. We can still choose to support the independent businesses that are pursuing their own paths. And we can do our best to avoid pumpkin spice latte coffee creamer.

Header image by Nataliya Vaitkevich via Pexels