Bone Broth Lattes Lead a Savory Coffee Revolution Across US Menus

When TikTok creator Halley Kate called Maman's salted honeycomb tahini latte the best coffee she had ever had, the video hit 45,000 likes in a matter of hours. That was March 2025. The New York bakery and café chain has kept the drink on the menu ever since, with customers attempting to recreate it at home. It is one of the cleaner data points in a broader, more contested shift happening across U.S. café menus: savory coffee is arriving in force, and bone broth is its most polarizing ambassador.

Miso, tahini, and salted cream cheese foam have been building momentum alongside it. Salted cream cheese foam layered over cold brew has become one of the fastest-growing café formats nationally, assembled from whipped cream cheese, flaked salt, and a small amount of heavy cream. The miso latte draws on fermented soybean paste that has anchored Asian cooking for centuries, appearing both solo and combined with tahini for additional depth. Milwaukee-based Discourse Coffee took the concept further when it served a ramen latte at a pop-up inside Chicago's Urbanbelly, consistent with a standing menu that already includes pork fat, caramel, and tellicherry black pepper.

Bone broth coffee has found a specific buyer: health-focused drinkers who already consume broth in the morning and see the coffee addition as a functional upgrade. The drink adds collagen and protein to the cup and has built a following among people who prioritize gut health. Fresh Cup Magazine has pointed to bone broth coffee as part of a broader industry pivot away from traditional sweet profiles, a shift playing out across menus from independent cafés to viral social posts.

Ryan Castelaz, who founded Discourse Coffee and now operates three locations, frames the savory turn in craft terms that have nothing to do with collagen. He opened the business "with the hope of telling really beautiful, important stories, and what we saw was that our ability to do that was extremely limited if the only thing we had to play with was sweet." The wellness pitch for bone broth centers on protein and gut health; baristas making the same pivot argue from a different direction. Savory additions, they say, balance coffee's inherent bitterness and create more complex, "round" flavor profiles. "What we've been able to do with our baristas by unlocking savory flavors is to greatly expand the rulebook and the field of inspiration," Castelaz said. Those two rationales are not the same argument, and whether the trend sustains may depend on which one actually converts at the register.

Savory coffee pairings have deep cultural roots, from Scandinavian kaffeost to Tibetan butter tea, both of which predate the current wellness cycle by centuries. What has changed is distribution: TikTok virality, a gut-health consumer base, and baristas willing to reach past the syrup rail have pushed these formats into mainstream café visibility.

The most honest test case for how far this goes is probably the menu Castelaz runs, where ramen and pork fat sit alongside tellicherry black pepper under the umbrella of storytelling. That is either a vision of where café culture is heading, or the clearest available sign that some rules exist for a reason.