This Philly coffee shop charges for to-go cups. Are they right?

No, it’s not a belated April Fool’s joke: A Philadelphia coffee shop is now upcharging for disposable coffee cups.

Vibrant Coffee Roasters announced via Instagram last week that both its Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill locations will now be charging customers an additional 25 cents for ordering their hot or iced drinks in single use to-go cups.

“We are simply tired of all the single use plastic waste that we and everyone generates and we’d like to reduce that as much as possible,” the company wrote. “Second reason is of course money. No need for us to tell you how much the price of everything has gone up.”

Customers can avoid the charge by either bringing their own (clean) cup from home, or by ordering their beverage to stay and drink inside either Vibrant location.

Known for their larger-than-life cinnamon buns and award-winning Ethiopian coffee beans, co-owners Ross Nickerson and Matthew Adams opened Vibrant’s counter-seating only location at 222 W. Rittenhouse Square location in 2021. Three years later, a location with slightly more seating at 542 Lombard Street followed.

Nickerson told The Inquirer that the new policy is not meant to penalize customers for using a coffee shop like most on-the-go Philadelphians typically do: as a place to grab a quick hit of caffeine.

He also knows some people are going to take it that way regardless.

“Some people are going to be like, ‘You have this tiny store with no seating. Of course, I’m getting my coffee to go.’ And that’s true,” he said. But “the alternative was to just raise the prices” altogether.

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Vibrant is the only coffee shop in Philly currently charging for to-go cups to Nickerson’s knowledge, but not technically the first: Nickerson’s other coffee shop Function Coffee Labs at 1001 S. 10th Street started charging 25 cents per disposable cup in 2018 after seeing a popular café Portland, Maine, do the same over sustainability concerns.

Function’s policy didn’t survive beyond the pandemic, Nickerson said, after he realized too many people were trying to circumvent the charge. (Some customers would order drinks to stay only to ask for a to-go cup free of charge for their barely-sipped beverages moments later.)

Philly’s other foray into the environmentalist coffee space was in 2023, when Bodhi Coffee briefly experimented with a zero-waste model (wherein customers had to buy a mason jar if they forgot their own cup) before closing for good.

In other parts of the world, the fee is more common: Berkley, Calif., has required all cafés and restaurants to charge 25 cents for disposable cups since 2020, while South Korea instated a law that essentially mandated the same at the end of 2025.

For Nickerson, the new policy is as much about curbing waste as it is about trying to keep up with the rising costs of running a coffee shop.

Plastic coffee cups for iced beverages are typically made of polypropylene or polyethylene terephthalate, two substances that break down slowly in the environment while shedding microplastics and releasing other harmful pollutants. Paper cups aren’t inherently better, either: A 2023 study found that most paper cups are coated with a thin layer of plastic to prevent leakage, rendering them nearly impossible to recycle. Most compostable cups also end up in landfills because the United States doesn’t have enough commercial sites to handle them.

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Coffee shops are also facing mounting economic pressures as tariffs — coupled with volatile weather and shortages — have raised prices for coffee beans and matcha (among other things).

“There hasn’t been one single thing that hasn’t gotten more expensive,” said Nickerson. The price of each cup, lid, and drink sleeve recently went up a couple of cents per unit, plus rent at each of Vibrant’s location increased roughly 2% each year. Even the price of Nickerson’s preferred matcha brand Spirit Tea shot up roughly 10%, he said, despite being unaffected by the run on the trendy Japanese tea.

“If you’re not taking one of the cups and sleeves and lids that cost us money to buy, then I’m happy to charge you less because you’re not actually using the same amount of stuff that other people are,” Nickerson said with a dry laugh.

So far, the policy hasn’t yet resulted in more people bringing cups from home. Nor has it caused the amount of ire Nickerson initially expected.

“We’ve seen probably two or three people get upset about it,” he said.