This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dear coffee lovers,
We have a new favorite ingredient to talk about. Meet Bouquet Infusions, Caroline Lafleur’s thoughtfully crafted collection of syrups that caught our attention last year.
The flavor profiles sounded too delicious to pass up, so we reached out in late 2025 to arrange a collaboration featuring their Orange Marmalade syrup at a pop-up here in Norfolk, VA. That collaboration sparked a conversation with Caroline, giving us the chance to learn more about her journey founding Bouquet and her vision for the company. She’s one of a kind and brings a sparkling, warm energy to the coffee industry.
Grab a fresh coffee and enjoy our conversation with Caroline Lafleur. 👀
Huey Melendez: So, Caro, could you just tell us who you are and what you do?
Caroline Lafleur: Hi! I’m Caro, the founder of Bouquet!
We make syrups that bring bold, layered flavor to coffee without overwhelming it with sweetness. We use nothing artificial, and our flavors have one foot in the familiar and one in the surprising.
The name Bouquet is actually a bit of a word play. My last name is Lafleur, which means flower in French.
My background is in food science, but it all started with washing dishes in restaurants at 15. From there, I worked as a barista, in kitchens, and front-of-house before getting my master’s in food science. Once you’re in the food world, it’s hard to get away from it!
After school, I joined Mattson, a food innovation agency in California. Think Disneyland for food scientists. I worked on a lot of coffee projects there, which eventually led me to Bouquet.
Jon Hargreaves: I’m curious to hear more about your experience in “food innovation” at Mattson. What did your day-to-day responsibilities look like, and how did you get into that line of work?
Caroline Lafleur: During my master’s, the excitement around plant-based food was just starting to bubble. This was a little more than 10 years ago. We entered a competition with a plant-based burger that “bled” and ended up taking first place at the Institute of Food Technologists.
That win opened the door to an internship at Mattson, one of America’s leading food product development agencies. I’d read about them in Barb Stuckey’s book Taste, so getting to work there was really exciting.
It was really fun. Some days we’d be making cricket soup, other days macadamia milk. We worked with everyone from tiny startups to huge companies. You’d figure out how to make something taste good, then work out how to actually produce it at a larger scale.
Eventually, coffee became my focus. Nitro coffee was huge at the time, and I worked on everything from oat creamers to canned coffee. At one point, I even had to make coffee without coffee beans. Impossible to get bored.
Jon Hargreaves: Were you interested in coffee at the time, or was this your introduction?
Caroline Lafleur: Working front of house in Montreal, I did a lot of wine tasting. All the aromatic compounds you get in wine, you can get even more in coffee. That really made me fall in love with it. I lived near Fellow in San Francisco and would go to their cuppings every weekend. That’s really how I fell in love with it, tasting and discovering how different one coffee could be from another.
At Mattson, my favorite part was figuring out why a specific flavor didn’t taste quite right. Was the level of acidity right? Was the type of bitterness appropriate? Was something masking the flavor? We’d taste things together and try different adjustments. I could happily spend hours on those puzzles.
Looking back, Bouquet makes a lot of sense. It brings together that love of figuring out flavors with a love of coffee.
Huey Melendez: That’s an amazing background! When did you realize you wanted to start Bouquet, and what did starting up look like for you?
Caroline Lafleur: I’m a turbo-nerd, so I could happily spend all day in the lab. But after putting so much heart into developing products, I started wanting to be involved in what happened next, too. What would the brand look like? How would people use it? I wanted to see the whole thing through.
Between Mattson and Bouquet, I was Head of Product Development at a plant-based startup called Simulate. I learned a lot about building teams, running factories and tackling distribution. When our team was laid off, it was heartbreaking. But it also made me stop and think, “Maybe this is the moment to try something of my own.”
The idea for Bouquet came from all the coffee shops we’d visit during factory trials. I’d see a specialty drink that sounded really good and ask, “Could I get that with half the sweetness?” I love flavor, but I don’t have a huge sweet tooth.
And what would I get? Half the flavor.
That stuck with me. Could we keep all the flavor without making the drink so sweet? That was the question I wanted to work on.
And after spending so much time in labs, I wanted to build something that brought me closer to people. The coffee world felt so welcoming. Making something that baristas could play with and make their own felt like a really good place to start.
Huey Melendez: What sets Bouquet apart from the rest of the major syrup brands out there today?
Caroline LaFleur: Two things. First, using nothing artificial was a non-negotiable. And, second, I wanted to make flavors that were a little different, a little unexpected. That’s what I wanted to see more of, so that’s what I did.
I also wanted to give baristas something more fun to play with and boost creativity. Instead of cinnamon, I’d do cardamom. Instead of regular caramel, I’d do brown butter caramel, because you get that nutty dimension. It’s not just caramel. There are multiple layers. I wanted to reverse the script. Rather than being something sweet with a hint of flavor, it’s the opposite. It’s more concentrated, so you only need a little, and you can create drinks that are less sweet. I think you quoted “Syrup for grown-ups,” which made me laugh, because yes, that’s pretty much it.
One of the things I’m most proud of is that we’ve convinced coffee purists to give Bouquet a go. Our first clients, and the ones we continue to retain, were people who didn’t have flavored beverages at all, or maybe had a vanilla latte. They were protective of their coffee, which I completely understand.There’s so much work that goes into growing, sourcing, roasting, and extracting. You want to be thoughtful about what you add.
So, being able to develop beverages with them that highlight their coffee and their brand ethos means a lot to me.
Jon Hargreaves: What’s the full meaning behind the name “Bouquet”?
Caroline Lafleur: I liked that it kept a little French in there, because that’s part of my culture. But it also says a lot about how we think about flavor. Each flower in a bouquet has its own character, and the right combination brings out the best in each one. We approach flavors in a similar way.
Take vanilla and fleur de sel. You’re not trying to make vanilla taste salty. That little bit of salt brings out something you might not have noticed otherwise. Or brown butter in caramel, which adds a lovely nutty dimension to something familiar.
Getting those combinations right takes time. I spent a year and a half developing the range, tasting and adjusting, but also figuring out how to make everything shelf-stable without artificial ingredients. It’s a lot of little decisions. For example, Orange Marmalade is orange, but there’s no coloring in it. I use turbinado sugar to create that color. It’s about understanding every ingredient and making sure that if it’s included, it has a function. That’s what spending years in the lab taught me: research every ingredient to the extreme depth of it.
So the name is about that care in bringing things together. And then the barista brings their coffee and their own ideas, and the arrangement keeps growing.
Jon Hargreaves: Bouquet’s packaging and type design is something that we admire. Could you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind the art direction for Bouquet’s packaging and brand?
Caroline Lafleur: Thank you! Because my background is in science, bringing the visual side to life was very much a team effort with my partner, Ben, and our friends Erik and Rasmus at Walk A Thought.
We knew we wanted something elevated but not pretentious. But often, elevated means minimal. And our flavors are the opposite of minimal. So it was a bit hard at first.
Things started to click when we talked about each flavor as its own character. From there, Erik and Rasmus built a whole world around it, with the illustrations, the colors, and the slightly cheeky copy. It felt like us.
We care a lot about what’s in the bottle, but we also want people to have fun with it. The packaging should give you a little taste of that before you even open it.
Jon Hargreaves: I love the illustrations! Who made them for Bouquet?
Caroline Lafleur: That’s Rasmus! He’s so creative. Each flavor name has its own lettering, which gives it a personality, and the little characters have bits of our lives tucked into them. Our undying love for cats and weird haircuts had over the years made it to the packaging!
The colors were surprisingly hard to get right. We wanted them to look tasty and feel refined, but still a little muted. Erik and Rasmus did such a fantastic job finding that balance.
And there’s room to keep playing. Every new flavor means another character gets to join the Bouquet world.
Huey Melendez: We loved seeing Bouquet collaborate with Rocky’s Matcha and Minor Figures on the Cardamom Matcha Mojito for Portola Festival last year. How did that collaboration come together?
Caroline LaFleur: I met the Minor Figures folks at World of Coffee (WOC). Sightglass Coffee had placed second in one of their throw-downs using our Orange Marmalade syrup, and that got us talking.
Later, I went down to LA and we made four or five drinks together. One of them was the shaken oat matcha mojito with our Green Cardamom syrup.
Everyone got excited about it, and the conversation became, “Where could we serve this?” They talked to their friends at Rocky’s Matcha, Portola Festival was happening, and it just kind of came together naturally.
Huey Melendez: Sightglass is one of the most prominent coffee roasters on the West Coast. Can you tell us about Bouquet’s relationship with them?
Caroline Lafleur: Sightglass Coffee became my favorite neighborhood coffee shop as soon as I moved to San Francisco. I was already a bit of a fangirl when I met their team at WOC and floated the idea of creating seasonal drinks with natural syrups and flavor profiles that would complement their coffee.
To my surprise, they were open to hearing more, so I went full nerd. I spent time tasting their coffee and built three drinks around what was naturally in their cup.
An orange marmalade espresso tonic picked up on the citrus peel notes. Brown butter miso caramel played with the caramel notes, and a green cardamom mocha brought in a little spice.
A week after the first order, we realized we needed five times as much syrup as we’d planned. The brown butter miso caramel was supposed to be seasonal, and now it’s a year-round menu item.
We still make drinks together, which has been really fun. Working that closely with them, you see how much they care about every little detail. They take their coffee seriously, so having them trust Bouquet enough to put it in their cup means a lot to me.
Jon Hargreaves: Is there a syrup flavor you’ve been chasing but haven’t quite landed the right recipe for yet?
Caroline Lafleur: Yes, sour cherry! It’s been eating at me a bit.
I often think about things that work well with chocolate and go, “Why not in coffee?” Orange Marmalade started that way, and I think cherry could be really good, too.
But I haven’t quite cracked it. In a tonic, it works really well. With milk, something’s still not right.
And cherry is tricky because people immediately think of maraschino cherry. That’s not the flavor I’m going for. I want it to taste like actual sour cherries.
Sometimes I have to put my business hat on, not just my scientist hat. A flavor needs a place on a café menu, and I can’t keep every experiment in storage forever. But I haven’t given up on this one.
Right now, we’re working on something secret for the holidays. Shhhh.
Jon Hargreaves: Will Bouquet’s syrups be available to purchase online soon?
Caroline Lafleur: That’s the goal! Until recently, it’s been just me, but I’ve now brought someone on to help (shout-out, Parker!) Now, we’ve got a little more brain juice to figure it out.
Shipping glass is tricky, especially when you’re trying to keep shipping costs reasonable. We want to get that part right before promising a date.
We’ve been getting DMs from people all over the U.S. asking for bottles, which is really exciting. We hear you! We’re working on it.
Huey Melendez: Last question. What’s next for Caroline Lafleur?
Caroline Lafleur: More time out in the coffee world. So much of the beginning was spent developing the products and figuring out how to make everything work. Now I’d love to meet more baristas and bring Bouquet to more cafés around the country.
I also want to share more recipes and ideas. It’s really fun to see someone take a flavor you’ve spent so much time with and do something you wouldn’t have thought of.
So, more collaborations, more events, and more chances to say hi. You guys have been a lovely reminder of how much can come from just starting a conversation.
Caroline LaFleur: I had a question! Overall, because you’ve been in the coffee scene, do you think that specialty coffee purists, like I was talking about earlier, are more open to flavored drinks? Or do you think there’s always going to be a segment that will stay purist?
Jon Hargreaves: I think there will always be purists, and that’s great. For me personally, I love making pour-overs and drinking single-origin espresso, but when it comes to a specialty drink, I’m going to jump all over it if it sounds amazing and uses good ingredients. I think the market for the non-purist is bigger, but there’s a route for both.
Caroline Lafleur: Instead of an OR, we can do AND.
Huey Melendez: Correct.
👀 Where you can find Bouquet →
👀 Learn more about Bouquet →
We walked away from this conversation feeling inspired by Caro’s work and how focused her vision is for Bouquet. We’ll be watching closely as Bouquet continues to blossom. If you’d like your café to start carrying their syrups, reach out here to get in touch.
Stay tuned for more Coffee Club interviews! Let us know in the Coffee Club chat if there’s someone you’d like us to interview next. 👀
Have a beautiful day,
Jon Hargreaves
Coffee Club Founder/Designer
Editor: Lexi Deverich
Direction: Huey Melendez & Cortez Artis
