The Australian climate lends itself to be one of the largest nations of café cold drink consumers per capita.

We love our café iced coffees and banana smoothies. Our grandparents grew up on vanilla malted milk shakes and the branded iced coffee in the carton out-sold Coca Cola in the eighties. The café style iced beverage has progressed into a category of its own and some Aussie café franchises see 60% of the total revenue coming from iced drinks in the Summer.

We have been rewarding barista’s for years for their coffee skills but have overlooked one of the most important revenue areas of a café, the humble cold beverage and its creators. We want to spotlight these unsung heroes and the cafés they work at. Café Culture has teamed up with The Alternative Dairy Co (ADC) to find the Australian champion Cold Drink Alchemist. We all know that plant-based milks make extremely good bases for cold blended drinks, so with some creative minds of industry we have formulated a competition that will reward the clever café worker for their skills in presenting a tasty iced beverage to a panel of industry experts.

The competition will be rewarding the winners with some amazing prizes and will allow the entrants to show their creativity with drink styling, pricing and overall taste. The drinks will be presented each week with a different ADC plant milk, almond, soy or oat. The cold beverage can incorporate any complementing additive, apart from alcohol, and be indulgent or super healthy. Drinks can also be any desired consistency, smoothie-style bowls are welcome.

The competitor, once entered, will be posted out samples of the ADC range and they can enter each category if they like. The competition will run for a 3 week period, with the grand champion chosen in Week 4 from the three top scorers over Week 1, 2 and 3. To be in the running competitors simply need to upload a photo of their cold drink creations to their own Instagram page with all relevant tags, and provide a recipe of their concoction.

There are some amazing prize packs to be won thanks to ADC, such as café starter packs including ADC milks, merch and more, industrial blenders, gift cards and not to mention a whole lot of free marketing. The winning drinks will also be featured in the upcoming official ADC recipe book!

So, are you Australia’s top cold drink alchemist? Register for the Hello Summer competition today to find out!