- QSRs are betting on café-style drinks — from Chick-fil-A’s new Daybright brand to McDonald’s CosMc-inspired beverages
- Taco Bell’s Live Más Café has sold 600 million drinks this year, with beverages now included in over 60% of its orders
- With Gen Z flocking to drink-forward chains like 7 Brew and Dutch Bros, traditional QSRs are racing to join in
ONCE satisfied with selling cola and fries, many quick-service restaurants (QSRs) now view drinks as high-margin opportunities and brand extenders.
With consumers looking for more than burgers and drive-thrus, chains like Taco Bell and Chick‑fil‑A are launching café-style concepts, while McDonald’s’ ill-fated spin-off – as a stand-alone concept, at least – shows the risks involved.
The unfolding shift reveals how beverage strategy is transforming fast food’s future.
Coffee is no longer just a breakfast add-on. For fast-food operators, high-margin specialty drinks offer a route to higher spend per visit, new day-parts and social-media-worthy formats. At Taco Bell, the recently launched Live Más Café has sold more than 600 million beverages this year, up 16% from the year-ago period and with more than 60% of the chain’s orders including a drink.
Meanwhile, Chick-fil-A is entering the space with its standalone concept Daybright, set to open in Atlanta later this year.
The strategy addresses two challenges: traffic growth and positioning. As food margins shrink under cost pressures, beverages provide a relatively insulated uplift. Moreover, the café concept helps reposition chains beyond burger-and-fries into lifestyle categories.
“Premium beverages are where the growth is, and QSRs want to tap into that segment,” says Danny Klein, VP Editorial Director, Food, Retail, & Hospitality at WTWH Media.
“Margins are great, especially on specialty drinks like coffee, energy blends, or protein drinks. These colourful, afternoon-focused drinks are brand extensions that pull in younger customers. Dunkin’s done it with bright, Gen Z-friendly launches. I’ve been told that what soda once was, these drinks are now: a gateway to the coffee habit.”
The motivation is clear: coffee chains like Starbucks once dominated morning habits; now, QSRs see an opening to capture both drinkers and the social routines that surround them.
With Starbucks reporting flat same-store sales for Q4 2025, fast-food players smell opportunity. For them, beverages are not ancillary – they may become core.
“The beverage business is booming – especially out-of-home and convenience – driven by millennials and Gen Z,” says Michael Abata, brand marketing, partnerships, and licensing consultant. “So it’s no surprise that legacy fast-food chains are repositioning around drinks to capture that growth, particularly as new players like 7 Brew, Dutch Bros, Scooter’s Coffee and Black Rock Coffee Bar flood the market.”
Lessons from experiments
The beverage push is not without risk. McDonald’s pilot of CosMc’s – a stand-alone drinks concept launched in late 2023 – was shuttered less than two years later, with all five locations closing by June 2025. But CosMc’s is not the brand fail many think it is.
“CosMc’s may have struggled as a standalone, but McDonald’s has already signalled it was a learning lab – and several CosMc-inspired beverages are now rolling out to hundreds of US stores,” says Michael.
“That suggests the real opportunity is integration, not spin-offs. Daybright is a different kind of test: a fully separate brand that lets Chick-fil-A reach drink-focused consumers without diluting its core identity as a chicken chain. For a company so tightly defined by one category, a standalone beverage brand may actually broaden its audience far more effectively.”
McDonald’s used CosMc’s as an innovation lab – and the insights fed straight back into the core brand. The company has since built a dedicated beverage category team and now sells CosMc’s top-selling drinks in selected McDonald’s outlets.
“CosMc’s was never really meant to live alone,” reiterates Danny. “It was a test – to see how far McDonald’s could stretch into that space, remaining close to its parent brand. It may have started off as a stand-alone concept, but although the stores shut down, the products live on.”
“Chick-fil-A’s Daybright, by contrast, doesn’t even look like Chick-fil-A – and that’s smart. The premium products it sells don’t match its original fast food proposition, so it makes sense to keep them as separate ventures. Taco Bell on the other hand has done pretty well with Live Más Café as an integrated venture. It already had the flavours, the lifestyle branding, the cantina-style spaces – so their move into beverages feels more organic, more like a bolt-on than a reinvention.”
The drinks space demands both operational excellence and fast adaptation, and CosMc’s failure provides caution. While McDonald’s said the format served as a “learning lab,” the standalone experiment exposed sectoral traps: high expectations, complex menu operations and consumer resistance to paying café-prices at fast-food venues. It underlines that beverage lift is neither automatic nor assured.
By contrast, chains now favour integrated roll-outs rather than full spin-offs. Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A are embedding café-level systems within familiar brand frameworks and targeting younger drink-centric consumers. Taco Bell, for example, has a goal of building its beverage business into a $5 billion segment by 2030.
The key: treat beverages not as an afterthought, but as a strategic business unit with its own insights and infrastructure. Initial roll-outs and pilots often strategically take place in rural areas with lower competition from local businesses. Daybright, for example, launched in Hiram, Georgia.
“Across all these brands, the theme is the same: it’s a hot category, and everyone wants in,” says Danny. “This industry moves like dominoes. Many of these brands start in smaller markets where they can dominate quickly without competing against a dense field of local cafés.”
What this means for coffee, consumers & supply chains
For consumers, the evolution means more premium drink options at familiar venues. The drive-thru is becoming a hybrid café, offering cortados, americanos, cold brew, layered dairy alternatives and Instagram-ready visuals, as well as innovative service.
The beverage occasion is no longer purely breakfast – it permeates midday, afternoon and late-night.
For coffee supply chains, the impact is broader. Fast-food operators don’t just want “regular” drip coffee – they seek distinctive formats, faster turnover, social-media-worthy flavours and consistent sourcing. This raises the premium for supply chain flexibility and may accelerate origin diversification and quality grading programmes.
For example, drink-focused QSRs may increasingly demand higher green-bean quality or efficiency gains to support bespoke beverage menus. Daybright has partnered with Thrive Farmers, a US specialty coffee importing group that partners directly with farming families.
Yet these shifts come with caveats. As fast-food chains ramp beverages, they may prioritise scalability and cost efficiency over specialty-coffee provenance. The risk is dilution of coffee as a craft category, replaced by heavy-marketing of novelty drinks.
For specialty-coffee producers, the takeaway is that a growing segment of demand is coming from non-traditional channels who care less about cupping scores and more about flavour, brand and familiarity. Chains like Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A are pulling coffee into mainstream venues, not coffee-houses. This may mean higher volume, but also lower margins and different quality expectations.
For consumers, this movement could trigger a shift in expectations.
“It’s like the ‘better burger’ moment all over again,” says Danny. “A few years ago, we started talking about ‘better burger’ chains. McDonald’s got involved with quarter pounders, which opened up a sector conversation of what is a better burger. We could be seeing the same thing happening with coffee.”
“Big chains are chasing a premium niche, and that raises the bar for everyone. Daybright looks upscale – cortados, americanos, protein coffees – nothing fast-food about it. Starbucks keeps the high ground, Dunkin’s getting creative, but Chick-fil-A went straight for that polished neighbourhood-café feel.”
As fast food chains launch their own premium brands and spin-offs, where does that leave premium coffee chains or coffee-focused chains like Starbucks, Dunkin and 7 Brew, for example?
“New players like 7 Brew, Dutch Bros and Scooters are winning with hyper-innovative drinks, drive-thru convenience and high-energy staff interactions,” says Michael. “As fast-food brands scale up, they’ll need to lean hard into convenience and memorable service – the very areas where Starbucks and Dunkin are starting to fall behind.”
Ultimately, the evolution of coffee strategy among fast-food chains signals a shift in how beverages are valued in the dining ecosystem: no longer incidental accompanying items, but drivers of traffic, margins and brand identity. The fast-food players that get this right may not just steal share from coffee-shops – they may redefine the coffee business itself.
Coffee Intelligence
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