Coffee Digest · Aug 21 — Beyond the morning cup

Coffee is taking on more jobs in the same visit. Cuvée's new South Austin flagship runs coffee, draft beer, cocktails, and later-day food from one 2,000-square-foot lobby; on the production side, Odeko and IMF/INCAPTO are making supply and roast repeatability part of the same conversation. 123

Odeko announced on Aug. 20 that it had acquired Seattle-based fresh-food distributor Catapult NW, which supplies local brands and vendors to coffee shops, cafes, grocers, and corporate institutions across the Pacific Northwest. Catapult customers will gain Odeko's online ordering platform, national catalog, 24/7 support, and financing and insurance products. Odeko also entered an exclusive distribution partnership, in some channels, for Artisan Premades sandwiches and salads. 2

For a cafe, the implication is practical: a supplier platform is trying to make food, ordering, and back-office services feel like one relationship instead of three vendor calls. The deal says more about the modern cafe's lunch case than its espresso machine.

Spanish coffee company INCAPTO is working with IMF on roasting technology built around process control, traceability, and repeatable batch profiles as INCAPTO expands from home coffee into offices and hospitality. Automation reduces manual adjustments, air recirculation reuses roasting heat, and integrated scales record green-coffee intake and roasted-coffee discharge for each batch. 3

That matters to drinkers in a less glamorous way than a new machine name: the same roast has to hold across the tenth batch, the hundredth batch, and a new service account. Better data cannot rescue poor coffee, but it can make good coffee easier to repeat.

Cuvée Coffee has opened a flagship in the lobby of The Code at 2323 S. Lamar Blvd. in South Austin. The public, 2,000-square-foot space has separate stations for coffee, draft beer, and cocktails, while the menu moves from espresso drinks and nitro cold brew to pastries, bagels, and later-day sandwiches, wraps, melts, and tacos. 1

The design is the point: coffee remains the anchor, but the shop can catch a morning commuter, a pool guest, and an evening drinker without asking the bar to run one kind of shift all day.

Barista's Daily Grind is scheduled to open Monday inside West Center at the University of Nebraska at Kearney in Kearney, Nebraska, taking over the former Brewed Awakening space. The campus bar will run 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday and serve espresso drinks, brewed coffee, cold brew, teas, smoothies, energy drinks, and a smaller food menu, with online ordering and campus delivery. 4

UNK is keeping the teaching function while shifting daily operations to a local private operator: students can still get paid work, internships, workshops, and coursework tied to retail finance, marketing, supply chain, and operations. For a campus cafe, the interesting detail is the operating model as much as the drink list. 4

A Perfect Daily Grind feature published Aug. 20 explains why ready-to-drink coffee cannot simply be a cafe recipe poured into a can. Roasters have to choose between black and milk-based formulas, test how flavourings behave during pasteurisation and storage, and validate packaging for shelf stability. The article describes cold extraction and tunnel pasteurisation as a route to up to 12 months of room-temperature stability, depending on the product and process. 5

The piece is sponsored by Hardtank, so its production example has a commercial angle. The technical lesson still holds for anyone comparing bottled cold brew with a cafe pour: longer shelf life changes refrigeration, logistics, texture, and the moment when the drink is consumed. 5

Coffee Fest Los Angeles runs Aug. 21–22, 2026, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The official Coffee Skills Series schedule includes hands-on espresso and milk training, cupping, pressure profiling, grinder troubleshooting, pour-over essentials, and sensory skills. 6

For anyone attending today, the less flashy sessions may be the best use of time: a clean, correctly dialled grinder changes more cups than another signature-drink idea, and pressure profiling is easier to understand when someone lets you touch the controls.