Lavazza's 2027 annual calendar, titled Always a Pleasure, uses fifteen photographs across three cities to position coffee not as a product, but as a shared cultural ritual — a framing with direct relevance to operators building around experiential service and café culture.
The 35th edition of the Lavazza calendar was unveiled at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where the Italian coffee group has held a partnership since 2014. Creatively directed by agency Armando Testa, the project dispatched three Magnum Photos photographers — Jim Goldberg, Alex Majoli, and Paolo Pellegrin — to New York, Lisbon, and Hong Kong respectively, capturing coffee's presence across four distinct moments of the day.
The Creative Premise
The unifying theme is deliberate restraint: coffee appears not as the subject of the images but as what Francesca Lavazza, Board Member of the Lavazza Group, calls "a discreet presence" threading through spontaneous, ordinary moments. "Their visual languages are profoundly different, yet they share an ability to capture what unfolds between people, in spontaneous gestures and seemingly ordinary moments," she said. "This is precisely where coffee finds its natural place: not as the protagonist, but as a discreet presence, a daily ritual that accompanies our time and creates opportunities to come together."
For hospitality operators, that positioning echoes a broader industry conversation about beverage ritual and café experience design — how the physical and emotional context around a coffee order shapes guest perception as much as the coffee itself. Michele Mariani, Executive Creative Director at Armando Testa, described the goal as creating "an authentic, universal narrative in which the ritual of coffee becomes a thread connecting different cultures and places — slowing time down and bringing the emotion of small, everyday gestures into focus."
Coffee Culture at Scale
The calendar's geographic spread — across three continents and markedly different café cultures — reflects Lavazza's global footprint. The Turin-founded group, now in its fourth generation of family ownership, operates in 140 markets and produces more than 30 billion cups annually across brands including Lavazza, Carte Noire, Merrild, and Kicking Horse. Annual group turnover exceeds €3.9 billion.
For foodservice buyers and restaurant beverage program decision-makers, the campaign reinforces Lavazza's investment in brand storytelling as a commercial differentiator — particularly as premium coffee continues to gain share in full-service dining, hospitality, and workplace environments. The brand's sustained cultural programming, now spanning more than a decade of Guggenheim partnership and the IncluVisity museum-access initiative launched in 2023, positions it as a category player with an identity built well beyond product specifications.
The photographers' own reflections reinforce coffee's ambient, connective role. Paolo Pellegrin, shooting in Hong Kong, described looking for "the moment when the unspoken — life itself — bursts into the frame." Alex Majoli, working in Lisbon, spoke of "the intensity of presence: those fleeting moments when the theatre of everyday life suddenly reveals itself." Jim Goldberg, photographing New York, framed pleasure around creative expression and shared experience.
Together, the images make a case that coffee's value to consumers extends beyond caffeine or flavor — a point operators and Food & Beverage Magazine have both tracked as premium positioning increasingly drives purchasing decisions in on-premise channels.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
