INDUSTRY PROFILE
Shake it up MONIN showcases the limitless menu possibilities when quality coffee and flavoured ingredients join forces to drive seasonal trends in the café market.
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ith the months getting cooler, it’s not just food menus that undergoes a transformation. John Davidson, Head of Advocacy and Innovation at Stuart Alexander, an exclusive distributor of MONIN in Australia, is equally excited for the flavour opportunities the autumn months present for beverage solutions. “Australians have pioneered cold brew in summer, and now it’s time to move over to hot beverage serves, which always reigns supreme,” says John. “Nostalgia is currently playing a big part in consumer’s decision making. Particularly coming out of two COVID years, they don’t have a lot of purchasing confidence and are looking for familiarity. The want something delicious and something they understand flavour-wise.” As such, John says baked and cocoa flavours from the MONIN range are ideal to satisfy these cravings, especially when paired with coffee, a roasted product itself. He’s also a fan of dark chocolate, white chocolate, salted caramel, and biscuit-style flavours such as gingerbread and chocolate cookie, which John says MONIN has worked really hard to perfect at its innovation centre. “Once you get these flavours into a glass and taste it, you can really feel the love and effort that’s been put into creating these syrups,” he says. “What you get in the glass is real chocolate cookie, for example. It doesn’t smell like artificial or highly processed chocolate cookie. It smells yeasty, baked, cooked, warm, fragrant, chewy, and bready. Once
During the cooler months, MONIN recommends experimenting with syrup flavours including chocolate, toasted marshmallow, caramel, and chocolate cookie.
you can put that into a serve and offer a gingerbread latte or hot chocolate on your menu, it heightens the senses and elevates your offering. It’s something additional in the barista’s arsenal.” While coffee will always remain the hero ingredient, John says it’s time for baristas and the wider hospitality industry to experiment with how delicate flavour pairings can work together and how to do it seamlessly. “If we had a really dark roast with chocolatey notes, for instance, you could add a MONIN chocolate flavour, but for an extra level of complexity, add walnut brownie flavour to give the coffee a more nutty element,” he says. “Creativity is almost limitless. We already have specialty coffee, specialty chocolate and specialty milks. Australia is by far leading the world in coffee serves, so there’s no reason we can’t play with coffee flavours and extend it in the same way great chefs do with desserts or a bartender does to a cocktail menu. There’s a gap between specialty coffee and specialty menus and I believe there’s room to have some serious fun there. I’d love to see more baristas embrace a mocha and see what level they
can take it to.” During the cooler months, John says caramel, vanilla and hazelnut are MONIN’s top three best flavour sellers. The next two favourites fluctuate between popcorn, salted caramel and toasted marshmallow, but John says biscuit flavours such as chocolate cookie are also on the rise. All MONIN syrup flavours are made with a pure cane sugar base and natural ingredients for intensity of flavour and shelf life. They are non-GMO, and free from gluten, dairy, fat, protein, and cholesterol. Where flavour can’t be harvested from a tree, MONIN uses specialised technology to innovate unique flavours. This technology includes the use of Supercritical CO2 machines and rotary evaporators which are used to distil and synthesis flavours. For example, a chocolate cookie placed in a supercritical CO2 machine with immense pressure can be infused into a concentrated sugar syrup. John says the fact that the flavour is distilled at such a low temperature preserves the integrity of each flavour. “This is the same equipment that’s used to make Chanel No. 5 [perfume].
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