Why Americans Drink Iced Coffee Even in Winter

The long read

In 2013, cold drinks made up 37 percent of the beverages Starbucks sold. By the spring of 2024, they were about 75 percent. The company that taught America to order a hot latte was doing three quarters of its drink business cold, and the reason had very little to do with the weather.

The iced coffee takeover did not happen because summers got longer. It happened in January, in parking lots and at bus stops, one plastic cup at a time. The real question is not why people drink iced coffee when it is hot. It is why so many Americans keep drinking it when it is freezing.

I. The winter warriors

On a 29 degree January morning in 2023, a customer leaving a Dunkin’ in Portland, Maine told the Portland Press Herald she had just shoveled snow and was a little warm. Then she added the part that matters: “I get iced coffee all year round.”

Dunkin’ has a name for these people: winter warriors. In December 2022 it promised “an iced coffee for those winter warriors that keep it cold all year long,” and a Dunkin’ marketing manager told the Press Herald that more than half of the chain’s coffee sales were iced drinks, summer and winter alike.

Independent shops saw it too. Mary Allen Lindemann, cofounder of Coffee By Design in Portland, said a shop used to go through one or two pitchers of iced coffee on a winter day. Now, “we are not talking about pitchers in the fridge. I’d say kegs.”

The national numbers agree. In the National Coffee Association’s January 2026 survey, 17 percent of Americans who drank coffee the day before had a cold one. That is roughly one in six choosing ice in the dead of winter. Georgetown marketing professor Wendy Zajack sees people walking around campus in January with iced coffee, and “it blows my mind.”

II. A cold drink with a long fuse

Iced coffee is not an American invention. One popular story traces a French cafe drink called the mazagran to an 1840 siege in Algeria, where soldiers are said to have cut their coffee with cold water. What America did was turn cold coffee into a mass habit, and the fuse was lit in coffee shops.

In 1987, a barista at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Westwood, California blended coffee, chocolate powder, milk and ice into what became the Ice Blended. In 1992, George Howell’s Boston chain the Coffee Connection wanted to keep summer sales up, so marketing manager Andrew Frank ran coffee, sugar, milk and ice through a frozen yogurt machine and named it after the New England frappe: the Frappuccino.

Starbucks bought the Coffee Connection in 1994 and launched its own blended version in 1995. By 1996 Frappuccino sales topped $52 million a year. For how Starbucks and Dunkin’ became the two giants of the coffee run, see Starbucks vs Dunkin’.

Then came the second wave. Starbucks brought Cold Brew to more than 2,800 stores in the Northeast, Mid Atlantic and Midwest on March 31, 2015, right after a frigid February. In April 2018 it launched Cold Foam, a frothy skim milk topping that gave iced drinks the foam they had been missing. By then, CNBC reported, cold had already reached 50 percent of Starbucks beverage sales.

America didn’t fall out of love with coffee. It fell out of love with waiting for it to cool down.

III. Their first coffee was cold

Ask why the shift happened so fast and analysts keep landing on age. In a July 2024 National Coffee Association survey, 45 percent of coffee drinkers ages 18 to 24 had a cold coffee in the past day.

Zajack’s theory is simple. Older drinkers met coffee hot and black. Her own kids met it as Frappuccinos in their teens. Because Starbucks and Dunkin’ are so prevalent, she said, “the first time [consumers] have the product is iced.”

Mintel’s surveys, reported by CNN, found that younger drinkers see cold coffee as more refreshing, better tasting and more of a treat than hot coffee.

IV. Why ice won

Generation explains who. For why, stack up a few very American habits.

The first is ice itself. “Americans have a preference for iced things, weird for the rest of the world,” Zajack said. “We’re one of the few countries where you get a soda and it is loaded with ice.”

The second is the commute. Zack Handlen, leaving a Portland Dunkin’ the morning after a snowstorm, explained the math to the Press Herald. “If I drink hot coffee, I have to wait the entire commute, and then I take sips from it and I burn my tongue,” he said. “With iced coffee, I can just drink it in the car.”

The third is taste. Lindemann called cold brew less acidic and compared it to a frothy Guinness (our cold brew guide covers how it is made). Gentler is an easier sell to someone who never loved bitter black coffee.

The fourth is the order itself. Iced drinks are built for customization, from syrups to cold foam to light ice, and Zajack says that feeds the wish to feel like your order is yours alone. We had fun with that idea in what your coffee order says about you. A clear cup shows off every layer, too. As Euromonitor analyst Dorothy Calba told CNN, “The clear cups, bright colors, and various toppings in iced drinks makes them highly attractive for social media posts.”

V. The kitchen table holds out

Here is the twist that keeps this story honest: hot coffee has not lost. In the NCA’s June 2026 survey, 71 percent of past day coffee drinkers had hot coffee and 21 percent had cold. And 83 percent of past day coffee drinkers had coffee at home.

The takeover lives at the counter and the drive thru window, where 55 percent of recent out of home coffee buyers ordered. Technomic estimated cold drinks were about 20 percent of the $88 billion American out of home coffee market in 2023, up from 13 percent in 2016. At the chains that set the trends, cold is the majority: Dunkin’ and Dutch Bros both told CNBC that most of their beverage sales come from cold drinks.

Plenty of winter warriors live a double life. Rachel Pelletier, holding an iced coffee on a sunny January morning in Portland, put it perfectly: “When I’m cold, I love having a hot cup of coffee at my house. When I go out to a coffee shop, I don’t know what it is, I like having a cold iced coffee.” Hot coffee is the ritual. Iced coffee is the outing.

VI. It’s just your drink

So why do Americans drink iced coffee, even in winter? Because it stopped being a seasonal drink and became a personal one: a treat you can customize, a cup that survives the commute, a flavor a generation grew up on, a little identity in a clear cup. Technomic’s Lizzy Freier summed up the menu data to CNN in five words: “It’s no longer a seasonal thing.”

Not everyone is converted. Will Pratt, one of the owners of Tandem Coffee in Portland, told the Press Herald his shop offers iced coffee in winter but does not sell much of it. Then he made the best point in this whole debate.

“There has never been an article about people who drink hot coffee in the summer.”Will Pratt, Tandem Coffee

Nobody calls the guy with a steaming mug in July a summer warrior. Maybe that is the real lesson of the takeover: temperature was never the point. If you are the friend walking through a snowstorm with an iced latte, you are not doing it wrong. You just know what you like.