Small Coffee Shop Invited the World to Steal Its Viral Latte Recipe
Most businesses guard their best ideas like trade secrets. Cody Larson, the owner of a small coffee shop in Northfield, Minnesota, decided to do the opposite — and what happened next is the kind of story the internet usually forgets to tell.
Little Joy Coffee opened in 2019 in Northfield, a close-knit town of about 20,000 people south of the Twin Cities. It's the kind of place where the same customer has come in every single day since the shop first opened its doors. In March 2026, Little Joy's manager and social media host Serena Walker posted a video as part of the shop's "DIY or Buy" series — a running segment where the team breaks down the cost of making one of their drinks at home versus buying it in the cafe.
The drink in question was their Raspberry Danish Latte: housemade raspberry syrup, whole milk, a double shot of espresso, and fresh cream cheese cold foam. It tastes like a raspberry Danish pastry in a cup. At around $8, Walker's verdict was that it wasn't worth making at home — but she added something at the end that nobody saw coming.
"We're inviting any coffee shop to steal this drink and put it on their own menu," she said directly to camera. Then, with a grin: "Not you, Starbucks."
The full recipe — scaled for commercial use — was made available for free to any independent coffee shop that wanted it.
The Response Was Immediate
Larson admitted he was nervous. "I was a little worried that no one would put it on their menu and we'd look like losers," he told Upworthy. By the next morning, the recipe had already been downloaded 9,000 times.
Within days, coffee shops across the country were reaching out. Then internationally. Little Joy built a map to track every shop that adopted the drink, and watched it fill up in real time. As of late April, more than 450 independent cafes in over 40 countries — including Canada, the UK, South Korea, Malaysia, Morocco, Egypt, India, Australia, and New Zealand — had added the Raspberry Danish Latte to their menus. The map itself had been viewed more than 3.3 million times.
Back in Northfield, Little Joy sold more than 3,000 Raspberry Danish Lattes in a single month — making it their most popular signature drink ever. At 33 Peaks Café in Southlake, Texas, owner Ripesh Neupane told TODAY that demand was so intense he couldn't even keep it on the regular menu. "If we keep it on the menu, we wouldn't be able to keep up with demand," he said. At Dolce and Ciabatta Bakery in Leesburg, Virginia, the latte had been on the menu less than a month and was already growing more popular every day.
The Philosophy Behind It
Larson's reasoning for giving away his best recipe is worth sitting with.
"People are shown so much stuff online that's out of reach for them, that when something finally is in reach, they're just happy to be a part of it," he told CNN. "By sharing the recipe with all coffee shops, we made it within reach, got it off the screen into the real world, which is a gap a lot of people are trying to bridge right now."
He also made a straightforward business case for generosity. "If all independent shops do better, we all do better," he said. And he was blunt about his view on exclusivity as a marketing strategy: "Exclusivity as a selling point might be dead."
He's not stopping at one recipe. Since the Raspberry Danish Latte went global, Little Joy has shared another recipe — the Matcha Dark and Stormy — with the same open invitation. "We're going to keep making our silly little coffee videos, sharing recipes and not gatekeeping," Larson said.
A Small Town That Needed Good News
The story has an extra layer of meaning for Northfield. Larson noted that 2026 had been a difficult start for many communities in Minnesota, with immigration enforcement operations affecting local businesses including the bakery that supplied Little Joy's pastries. "The bakery where we get our pastries from closed down because they were afraid," he said. "It wasn't some far off thing, it was happening in our community."
Against that backdrop, a local coffee shop accidentally becoming a symbol of small-business solidarity across 40 countries landed a little differently.
The Raspberry Danish Latte is $8 at Little Joy Coffee in Northfield. Or you can find it — for free — at one of hundreds of independent cafes around the world, made by a small business owner who got a recipe from a Minnesota shop that decided sharing was better than keeping secrets.
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