Iced coffee’s rise in America wasn’t a single moment but a series of waves, starting with industry campaigns in the late 1930s and building to a massive cultural shift in the 2010s and 2020s. Today, cold drinks account for roughly 75% of Starbucks’ U.S. beverage sales, and 24% of Americans reported drinking iced coffee daily in 2023. But the path from novelty to national obsession took the better part of a century.
The First Push: 1939 to the 1950s
The earliest organized effort to sell Americans on iced coffee came from the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, a cooperative of Latin American coffee growers formed in 1937 to promote coffee consumption in the United States. In 1939, inspired by the existing popularity of iced tea, the Bureau launched a decades-long campaign to convince Americans to drink their coffee cold. They ran advertising pushes in 1946, sponsored a radio show with Eleanor Roosevelt, and rolled out a large-scale “Cool Off With Coffee” campaign in 1956. They published recipe booklets with names like “Fun with Coffee” and coordinated with the National Coffee Association to get cafes and restaurants on board.
Despite the effort, iced coffee remained a niche summer curiosity for most Americans. Coffee culture in the mid-20th century revolved around the hot diner cup, and the industry’s push never generated the kind of habit change it was hoping for. The infrastructure simply wasn’t there: there were no drive-throughs optimized for cold drinks, no branded cups designed for ice, and no cultural expectation that coffee could be a refreshment rather than a warm pick-me-up.
The Frappuccino Changes Everything
The real turning point came in 1995, when Starbucks launched the Frappuccino nationally. It was a blended, sweetened, ice-cold coffee drink that appealed to people who didn’t even consider themselves coffee drinkers. By 1996, a bottled version hit grocery store shelves, making cold coffee something you could grab from a convenience store cooler. The Frappuccino reframed coffee as an indulgent, portable treat rather than a utilitarian morning beverage. By 2012, Starbucks was pulling in over $2 billion a year from Frappuccino sales alone.
Two years after Starbucks’ Frappuccino debut, Dunkin’ introduced its own iced coffee and frozen Coolatta beverages in 1997. Dunkin’ had 3,000 domestic locations at the time, giving iced coffee a fast-food footprint that extended well beyond the specialty coffee world. Where Starbucks made cold coffee aspirational, Dunkin’ made it routine and affordable, particularly across the Northeast, where ordering an iced coffee in January eventually became a point of regional pride.
Cold Brew Brings a New Wave
For about a decade after the Frappuccino boom, iced coffee in America mostly meant hot-brewed coffee poured over ice, sometimes with flavored syrup. That changed in the mid-2010s when cold brew moved from artisanal specialty shops into major national chains. Cold brew is steeped in cold water for 12 to 24 hours, producing a smoother, less acidic flavor that converts people who find traditional iced coffee too bitter. Starbucks added cold brew to its menu in 2015, and Dunkin’ followed in 2016.
Cold brew also opened the door to a booming grocery aisle category. The U.S. ready-to-drink coffee market is projected to reach nearly $11 billion by 2031, with iced coffee holding about 51% of that market and cold brew growing even faster. Starbucks now sells cold brew concentrate for home use, and dozens of smaller brands compete for refrigerator shelf space. The ability to grab a can of cold brew at a gas station or keep a carton in your fridge normalized daily iced coffee consumption in a way that café-only availability never could.
Social Media and the Aesthetic Era
If the 1990s gave iced coffee its commercial infrastructure, the 2010s and 2020s gave it cultural status. Instagram turned the clear plastic cup of iced coffee into a visual accessory. The layered look of milk swirling into espresso over ice became one of the platform’s most recognizable images, and coffee shops designed their drinks and cups with shareability in mind.
TikTok accelerated this further, turning homemade iced coffee into a genre of content. Viral trends cycle through constantly: espresso with orange juice, watermelon iced coffee, “cloud coffee” made with coconut water and non-dairy milk. Each trend pulls new audiences into cold coffee consumption, particularly younger drinkers who may never develop a hot coffee habit at all. Among Americans under 35, 37% now drink iced coffee daily, often regardless of season.
From Summer Drink to Year-Round Habit
Perhaps the most striking shift is that iced coffee is no longer seasonal. The Pan-American Coffee Bureau spent years trying to make iced coffee a summer alternative to hot coffee. Today, millions of Americans order it in December. Cold coffee purchases in the U.S. reached $17.7 billion in 2023, more than doubling from just a few years earlier. Daily iced coffee consumption jumped from 17% to 24% of Americans between 2022 and 2023 alone.
At Starbucks, cold beverages went from 37% of sales in 2013 to 75% by 2024. Both Starbucks and Dunkin’ have confirmed that a majority of their beverage sales now come from cold drinks. Climate-controlled cars, offices, and homes mean that outdoor temperature matters less than personal preference, and for a growing share of the population, that preference is cold. What the coffee industry spent decades trying to manufacture through advertising campaigns has become, for younger generations especially, simply the default way to drink coffee.