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We all know the feeling of rushing to eat our ice cream before it melts down the side of the cone, onto our hands, and down onto our clothes. But what if the cone itself was on a timer, because it was full of hot coffee?
Sounds slightly like a boisterous child’s kitchen experiment doesn’t it, but #coffeeinacone is a real food trend, and if you’re wondering about the hashtag, well according to CNN, it’s been instagrammed nearly one million times in five months.
Patented Cone
The craze was started by barista Dayne Levinrad, who after returning to his native Johannesburg after four years working as a coffee consultant abroad, felt he wanted to create something to put the city on the coffee map.
Through extended and no doubt messy experimentation, Levinrad and his team have devised a patented cone coated with four chocolate layers on the inside that gives the consumer roughly 10 minutes to drink the coffee – made with South American beans – before the whole thing disintegrates into an awful mess.
A photo posted by The Grind Coffee Company (@thegrindza) on May 14, 2016 at 11:14pm PDT
Social Media
Though this isn't the first time inventive baristas have attempted to serve coffee in a wafer recepticle – the B Cafè in Milan have their own version we're reliably informed, as does Zia Valentina in Los Angeles – Levinrad's background in marketing and his knowledge of social media has given him the edge. As he told CNN: “We used the cone as a way to become an Instagrammable product.”
The Coffee in a Cone is currently only available through The Grind, Levinrad's coffee shop in Johannesburg, and while the novelty appeal of such a creation is obvious, there is, at the core of the cone, some substance: the classic combination of coffee and chocolate, and the inherent thrill of a race against the clock.
