At Telescope Coffee in San Francisco, the strawberry milk comes in a berry-shaped cup. Phootgraph courtesy of Telescope Coffee. As a child growing up on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Jaron Hanus, 36, a co-owner of the Japanese-inspired cafe Neko Koneko in Honolulu, drank milk with every meal at the insistence of his grandmother. To make it more enticing, she would buy the strawberry-flavored kind from a local Japanese grocery store or make her own by simmering fresh strawberries in milk and honey. Hanus’s wife and business partner, Erin Yonamine, 45, also grew up on Oahu and remembers her grandmother plying her with ichigo (the Japanese word for strawberry) milk and ichigo milk candies from Shirokiya, an erstwhile Japanese department store in Honolulu. When the couple opened Neko Koneko in 2021, they created their own version of their childhood drink — updated with oat milk but just as vibrantly pink.
With the rise of industrial milk production in the mid-20th century, single-serve cartons became a fixture of school lunch trays throughout the United States, but also in countries including France, Korea and Japan. Flavoured milks soon followed. Nesquik introduced strawberry powder for milk around 1960, and the Korean company Binggrae added strawberry milk to its lineup soon after the debut of its banana flavour in 1974. While chocolate milk still dominates the flavoured milk market in the U.S., the margin may be narrowing. Lately, TikTokers have been swirling ruby streaks of fresh strawberry purée into milk, emulating a drink found in Korean cafes (including the country’s Starbucks coffeehouses). And last year, to commemorate the 12th anniversary of Dominique Ansel Bakery’s first location in Manhattan’s SoHo, the pastry shop, which had previously released a strawberry milk-flavoured version of its famous Cronut, collaborated with the Brooklyn fragrance company Joya Studio to produce a strawberry milk birthday candle.
“It’s a classic flavour combination that never goes out of style in Japan,” says Namiko Hirasawa Chen, 47, the Yokohama-born author of Just One Cookbook, a Japanese recipe blog. “It’s a solid part of Japanese food culture.” In the 1960s, when greenhouse cultivation spurred the production of strawberries, the main varieties grown were sour, so people mashed them with milk and sugar. Chen recalls ichigo-milk-flavoured candy — particularly the Sakuma Seika sweets introduced in the 1970s, with strawberry hard candy encasing crispy and creamy mille-feuille — as well as special spoons, flat-bottomed and dimpled, like the berry, used to crush strawberries before pouring milk over them. “Even now, with Japan’s supersweet domestic strawberries, people still enjoy strawberry milk,” Chen says.
Strawberry milk’s pleasing pink isn’t confined to Hawaii. At the Los Angeles bakery Harucake, known for its minimalist Korean whipped cream cakes, owner and baker Ellie You creates a parfait-like cup of strawberry milk as tidy as her confections — an even layer of fresh strawberry purée at the bottom, a layer of strawberry cream sweetened with sugar, and a tall, frothy layer of dairy or oat milk, topped with a strawberry slice. “It’s a connection to my childhood memories in Korea,” she says, but her version leaves out the artificial flavors she remembers, “letting the natural sweetness of the strawberries shine through.”
The strawberry milk at Telescope Coffee in San Francisco looks like a toy. It’s served in a chubby, berry-shaped cup, capped with a green plastic leaf-shaped lid. Jenny Ngo, 30, a pastry chef and the cafe’s owner, roasts fresh strawberries with sugar. “We want to draw out the sweetness and the floral notes of the fruit,” she says. The roasted strawberry purée is then layered with a milk of the customer’s choice, as well as an optional shot of matcha or espresso — the latter makes the drink taste surprisingly like a chocolate-covered strawberry. “I didn’t want a coffee shop with just caffeine. I have a lot of nieces and nephews and I thought this would be a really fun drink for them,” says Ngo. Made with fresh fruit grown in the Monterey Bay region of California, it’s only offered during the summer. Ngo buys the berries from Rodriguez Farm, the same farm that she and her mother patronised, at their local farmers’ market, when she was young.
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Fabbrica Newtown. Photographs by Trent V / Fabbrica. 
Courtesy of Eimele 
The Coffee machine. Photograph courtesy of Smeg x Dolce&Gabban. 
From canned tuna to crumbed fish and frozen greens, Simplot is committed to reducing waste. Photograph by Jason Loucas. 
