The Most Popular Coffee Chain in Every State, Ranked by Visits

It doesn’t have a second floor. There’s no place to sit down and enjoy your beverage. It looks like a lot of regular homes homes in America. It is not famous or well-known. But about 4,000 people stop by the tiny drive-thru coffee stand each day. Located along a six-lane road in Tucson, Arizona, the Dutch Bros at 4565 N Oracle Rd receives an estimated 1,468,282 visits a year, making it the most-visited coffee shop in the country.

Second place is the Starbucks Reserve Roastery on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, five floors and 35,000 square feet of it, the largest Starbucks on earth. It draws 1,289,266. The Tucson stand beats it by 179,016 visits a year without a single chair.

The winners in each state: Starbucks wins in 36; Dunkin’ takes 11, and four states prefer chains that are newer and for the most part didn’t have a national presence a decade ago. The data reflects one year of visits to 19,855 coffee shops across 17 chains.

How We Measured This

This ranking is not based on the total number of coffee chain locations, but on the number of visits. Nor is it based on sales. The goal is to find out, in each state, what is the coffee chain that people visit the most when walking or driving.

We measured foot traffic at every location of 17 coffee chains: Starbucks, Dunkin’, Dutch Bros Coffee, 7 Brew Coffee, Scooter’s Coffee, Tim Hortons, Caribou Coffee, Biggby Coffee, Black Rock Coffee Bar, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Better Buzz Coffee Roasters, Philz Coffee, Ellianos Coffee, Foxtail Coffee, Just Love Coffee Cafe, PJ’s Coffee of New Orleans and Ziggi’s Coffee. That is 19,855 individual shops and 4.95 billion visits a year between them.

Counts were made during a six-month period between March and August 2026. Traffic volume shown is annualized by doubling counts during this period and rates per resident are based on Vintage 2024 United States Census Bureau state-level population estimates.

In two instances, the busiest stores in a state are Starbucks or Dunkin’ counters in other businesses, such as a supermarket in Ocoee, Tennessee, and a fuel stop in New Haven, Vermont. Traffic to those stores would count for Food City and Jiffy Mart, not Starbucks or Dunkin’. So we replaced them with the busiest freestanding locations for Tennessee and Vermont. Also, we didn’t include Peet’s Coffee in this analysis, so we can’t make any claims about how well it does. Independent coffee shops are not included either. Our winners represent the busiest coffee chain in each state, not overall, but just among those 17 brands we looked at.

The Ten Busiest Coffee Shops in America

What the ranking shows: seven of the ten busiest coffee shops in the country are Dutch Bros drive-thrus, and two of the remaining three are 7 Brew. Only one Starbucks makes the list, and it is the largest Starbucks in the world.

Widen the frame to the top 25 and the pattern holds: 17 of those 25 shops are Dutch Bros. The chain has 1,133 measured locations against Starbucks’ 8,990, and it still owns most of the top of the list. Stretch the map and the busiest individual coffee shops in America are clustered in Arizona and California, with Illinois, Wisconsin and Oregon breaking in.

Starbucks Country and Dunkin’ Country

Surprisingly, Starbucks and Dunkin’ do not split the map exactly down the middle, nor does the distribution reflect their total number of locations. However, these two coffee titans make up a whopping 47 of the map’s 51 locations (the District of Columbia included).

Starbucks has the largest win in Montana, where 98.9 percent of the coffee shop visits we tracked were at Starbucks, and its thinnest win in Iowa, where it squeaks by Scooter’s Coffee by about one percent. It also wins in 11 of 13 Western states, 11 of 12 Midwestern states and every Southern state except Arkansas.

Dunkin’s 11 wins are all in one corner, the six New England states plus New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Dunkin’ doesn’t win a single state outside this group. Ohio is the closest call, but Dunkin’ still comes up 21 percent shy of Starbucks there.

The Challengers Are Smaller and Busier

The number that reframes everything: Measured on a per-shop basis, the two biggest chains in America fall to third and sixth. One standout is 7 Brew, a single stand draws more than half again as many visits as a Starbucks, and more than twice as many as a Dunkin’.

Meanwhile, 7 Brew averages 442,670 visits per location across its 506 shops in 35 states, and Dutch Bros averages 430,772 visits across 1,133 locations in 25 states. Those two businesses are focused on the drive-thru model. So, yes, a seatless coffee kiosk in Tucson draws more customers than a five-story coffee roaster and retailer in Chicago because it’s built around a drive-thru lane and a drive-thru window.

Who takes the “silver medal” spot, though? Here, Dutch Bros leads the pack, ranking second in nine states, followed by 7 Brew (six), Scooter’s Coffee (four), Caribou Coffee (two), Tim Hortons (one) and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (one). All told, one of these chains takes second place in 23 states, meaning that in nearly half of the country, neither Starbucks nor Dunkin’ finishes second.

Michigan is the most genuinely contested state in the country: no chain takes more than 38 percent of the market there. Starbucks is still the leader, with 46.8 million visits a year, but Tim Hortons (32.7 million visits) and Biggby Coffee, at 29.3 million, though not a leader anywhere, aren’t too far behind.

Check your own ZIP code. Type it in and the tool below will find your nearest shop, how busy it runs, and how your area’s coffee density compares with the rest of the country.

The Dunkin’ Wall

New England is the most strongly regionalized coffee market in the country. And not in the sense of being close or diffuse, the drop-off point is very clear and could be marked on a map with a sharp line.

Here is the finding in one comparison: Dunkin’ accounts for 20.9 percent of visits to coffee chains tracked in the rest of the U.S., but accounts for 78.7 percent of coffee-chain visits in the six New England states.

Dunkin’s weakest point in the region, Connecticut, is still a supermajority at 71.9% market share. Dunkin’s strongest point in the region, Rhode Island, is America’s top single-minded coffee market with an 85.6% market share. Massachusetts, with an 80.5% Dunkin’ share, is second. It also has the most Dunkin’ locations (712 measured) of any state.

New England leads the way when it comes to drinking coffee at a chain. Rhode Island (35.54 visits per resident a year), New Hampshire (32.71), and Massachusetts (29.32) are the top chain coffee drinkers, well above the nation’s annual per capita rate of 14.5.

The District of Columbia had the lowest number of visits at 1.90 visits per resident, followed by Alaska at 3.44 visits per resident, and Mississippi at 5.06 visits per resident. Part of the reason for the variation is consumer preference but it’s also due to availability. Only one of the 17 chains has locations in Alaska, and only two chains have locations in DC.

The Four States Neither Giant Wins

Interestingly enough, there’s a pattern to the four states that go to somebody else. All are won by chains that were founded in that state, but don’t win anywhere else.

Founded by brothers Dane and Travis Boersma, Dutch Bros started out in Grants Pass in 1992 and is dominant in Oregon, making up 60.1 percent of the market and has 61.96 million visits a year in Oregon. Its busiest shop is the Dutch Bros in Hillsboro with 1,066,310 visits.

Idaho is the second Dutch Bros state and its only winning market outside its home state: The chain has 43 stands there, which see an average of 387,220 visits.

Scooter’s Coffee is beating Starbucks in Nebraska by a ratio of 1.8 to 1. Scooter’s Coffee started with one drive-thru location in Bellevue in 1998. In Nebraska Scooter’s Coffee has 113 measured locations and 51.6% market share in Nebraska.

7 Brew leads Starbucks in foot traffic in Arkansas. The coffee chain, which was founded in 2017 in Rogers, is the youngest in the measured set, pulling in 15.84 million annual visits in Arkansas, compared to Starbucks’ 12.31 million.

Zooming back in, two states came within rounding error of making this group: Starbucks edged Scooter’s Coffee in Iowa by one percent (181,296 visits) and Starbucks beat Dutch Bros by two percent in Utah. Next closest are Caribou Coffee, 16 percent behind in Minnesota, and Scooter’s again, 14 percent behind in South Dakota.

Every State in the South

Starbucks takes 16 of the 17, and the exception is Arkansas. The more interesting detail is who keeps finishing second: 7 Brew has taken the runner-up spot in four Southern states in under a decade.

Every State in the Midwest

Three of the nation’s five closest races occur in the Midwest, with Scooter’s Coffee taking the number-two position in some markets, Caribou Coffee in others, Biggby Coffee, Tim Hortons and 7 Brew all scoring runner-up status in parts of the region. It’s the country’s densest coffee territory.

Every State in the Northeast

Here, Dunkin’ takes the top spot in all nine states, followed by Starbucks in each of them, showing a consistency of results not seen in any other region in the country.

Before the cards, the shape of it: And the dominance Dunkin’ has in New England is second to no chain anywhere else in the country. In each of the six New England states at the top of the map, Dunkin’ accounts for 72 to 86 percent of all counted coffee trips. There is no chain that comes close.

Every State in the West

Starbucks wins in 11 of 13 markets. However, in seven of the markets that Starbucks takes, Dutch Bros comes in second place. In particular, the race is close enough to change the map in Arizona and Utah.

What the Map Is Actually Showing

Although the map of winners makes the coffee market look rather settled, with one green chain dominating in almost all states, another orange chain dominating the northeast, and only four holdouts, it’s the map of second-place winners that reveals an excitingly competitive market. Regional chains place second in 23 states, and in five, the winner wins by less than 20%.

It also bears mentioning that per-shop metrics suggest customers are flocking in greater numbers to drive-thru focused chains over sit-down chains. The world’s largest Starbucks pales in comparison to the number of customers coming through a certain drive-thru in Tucson and it’s not an outlier but a trend. The fastest-growing chains in coffee are drive-thru focused and it shows at the top of the list.

Curious how your own neighborhood measures up on more than coffee? The Neighborhood Wellness Score scores every ZIP code in the country on food access, movement, environment and health, using the same measured-visit data behind this article.

Cory Jones

Cory Jones has spent 20 years in media and publishing and now leads the data and editorial operation behind The Greenest. He built and maintains the site’s Neighborhood Wellness Score — a proprietary dataset scoring food access, walkability, air quality, healthcare access, and health outcomes across 18,356 U.S. ZIP codes, drawing on CDC PLACES data, EPA air quality readings, and verified location intelligence. He is a huge fan of Rancho Gordo beans and tries to work out more than he actually works out.