It's somewhere in the middle to be honest. We did not invent freeze dried coffee - it's been around for over a century. However, it is quite difficult to make it work at-scale in a way that's profitable/sustainable, and that still tastes good.
I have a pretty extensive background in operations, manufacturing, & tech and I had to pull out every trick in the book to get this to work at our current scale & price. It was a lot of work.
It is also inherently more expensive to sell. All of the same things that make regular instant coffee taste bad also make it super cheap. We are trying to make it as affordable as possible, but at the end of the day the higher quality does require a more expensive process.
And if someone is buying instant coffee anyways, I doubt they care about the taste, or have preferred methods of milk/cream and sugar that would make any drown out any nuanced/bad flavor of ANY coffee.
But if I need to travel or whatever I will pick up the best instant I can find.
If this is as good as they claim, I'd buy it.
- Electric percolator with pre-ground Starbucks light-roast coffee (used to be Intelligentsia Honey Badger, before they souled-out to shitty Peet's).
- IKEA steel french press
- Nespresso (Original - not the supersize American version)
- Hario coffee hand mill for coffee beans (much rarely than before for time-availablity issues)
But, my go-to coffee on many days is the Folgers/Nescafé instant coffee.
If your instant coffee is really better (and I mean really) than what's on the market, and you can maintain consistent quality over time, I am in your target demographic.
Sign me up with a sampler!
Our target customer is the average person who goes to Philz, Blue Bottle, Stumptown as well as Starbucks. These people aren't really buying instant coffee - they spend $2-10 on coffee per day. Some of them buy 2 x $5 latte drinks at a cafe. 100% of these people drink their coffee for the taste (although they have different taste preferences). The average person who goes to Blue Bottle daily actually doesn't know much about the beans, where it's sourced, etc. This is a big misconception that we uncovered last May. These people are Blue Bottle loyalists who love the brand, but they really just want a good cup of coffee that makes them feel good. They don't care what country it came from and they don't really know what light roast vs dark roast is.
This is actually a HUGE market of people. The middle is much larger than the fringes.
Btw, I've said this in other places on the thread - we completely love people who are super into coffee and I still think we make a good product for those really into it, but I just want to highlight the large number of people in the middle who we often forget to talk about.
Here's some trends noted from the 2016 NCDT, which they do admit have only appeared within the past few years: "Behaviors that are slowly growing include lighter coffee consumption (slightly fewer drinkers and slightly lighter cups per drinker per day), drinking espresso-based coffee and drinking coffee out-of-home. Behaviors that are slowly declining include drinking traditional coffee and drinking coffee at home. Note that most of these shifts are occurring over the last few years."
Some other figures based on satisfaction of brewing methods found later in the report include:
86% very satisfied/satisfied with their drip coffee maker in 2016
94% with espresso
90% with single-cup
89% with instant
88% with coffee vending
It seems to me like there is a growing trend of more conspicuous consumption, as well as already high satisfaction across the board with people's status quo brewing methods.
It also seems to me like you're trying to make an instant coffee that carries with it the sort of branding that Philz, Blue Bottle, Stumptown, Starbucks, etc. have with physical locations which have the ability to foster certain groups of people, as well as convey aesthetic or ethical sensibilities through branding within the stores. It seems to me that this kind of branding is somewhat reliant on physical locations. I just don't buy into the assumption you make that you can target the same consumer that these places can.
Like, come on, the title of the NYT review on your coffee is: "Instant Coffee You’ll Actually Want to Drink", if that is any indication as to the mismatched conceptions people already have about instant coffee. It seems like you're climbing an uphill battle, considering the fact a cup of any other regular coffee costs about 7 cents, you're trying to sell instant coffee, but 36 times more expensive, based on branding and convincing people
Cafes, restaurants, and bars all make you FEEL something. If they do it well, you feel included, you feel part of a community, you feel like you belong. The average e-commerce experience doesn't do that at all - and yet we have so much information and data at our disposal to make the experience so much better.
However, we are a startup - that means (a) we aren't there yet, (b) we may not succeed - it's a risk - that's why we do what we do. We need support from the community to help us get there. But your comment captures exactly what we are trying to go out and do.
Regarding the market size - just some rule of thumb numbers - specialty coffee in the US is a $21B market. Instant coffee world-wide is a $30B market. Keurig got bought for $14B. I'm not a "we're taking over the world!" startup guy, but these are big numbers. A lot of people drink coffee in the US and the world. I've looked at a lot of different food segments and this one is big.
I think I'm in your market, too. Basically, enough people around me like good coffee that I'm spoiled. I'm not a big coffee drinker and not terribly picky, but I do have a taste for the good stuff.
If it were cheaper, I'd be all over it. Like, $1.50/cup, say. I mean, it still adds up over time, but by an order of magnitude less. Plus, it doesn't add up in terms of sugar like soda does. https://xkcd.com/1793/
...so, maybe I'm not in the target market just yet. Hopefully you'll get a decent economy of scale going. ^_^
We have a lot of customers who go through a similar experience. They use Sudden maybe 1-3 days a week when really busy and then pour over on others days when they have time. The pour over is still pretty enjoyable if you have the time.
But I would like to test a couple of cups of your coffee with friends. I never drank a good instant coffee so I really wonder how a good instant coffee tastes.
But a cup of great instant coffee could be awesome. Especially when you are camping or on music festivals. These were the only times I was using instant coffee. If their price point stays the same you won't save much on their model.
From a price standpoint I don't know if there is something much cheaper than buying coffee beans and making your own coffee.
Definitely won't save money compared to buying your own beans. It's the same as cooking - it's cheaper to grill a nice steak than buy one.
As a music festival goer - Sudden at festivals is about taste and speed. It tastes amazing. I usually pour it in a cold water bottle and shake it up (while in the middle of a performance) - really awesome. Definitely tastes better than festival coffee. Furthermore the coffee line at festivals is usually 30 minutes and they charge $5! This is obviously a personal pain point for me :-)
That's the only time when I'm buying instant coffee, but all the ones I've tried were bad or horrible.
To the Nespresso or Keurig model: it is the single serving in plastic tubes which rubs me wrong and which reminds me of these models.
I'd prefer something like a Nescafe glass with better coffee (and it can be really small, like 20 servings or something like that). More flexibel and less waste. But I understand that I may not be your target group and that the model right now is working much better for you.
And the Nespresso model is working great for them and is preferred by many people I know - it's just not for me.
The subscription model isn't great in this respect.
I travel up to a dozen times a year and backpack at least a couple weeks per year (in aggregate).
So that's 3x2x12 (3 cups per day of travel for each work trip) + 3x14 (backpacking trips). And probably another dozen or three here or there for random stuff (full-day bike rides, long drives, run out of beans @ work, etc.)
If I like Sudden, and especially if it's better than Starbucks drip served at airports, I'd use it for all of these things.
But I'm not going to+ sign up for a subscription because the vast majority of the year I'm happy with my espresso machine at home and decent drip at work. It's not like hygiene products where I just need a steady drip. My demand for instant coffee is very bursty. I expect that's true of others as well.
Maybe the logistics just don't work out without a subscription model, which is fine. And I certainly won't pretend to know what I'm talking about. But you're definitely losing one potential customer by forcing me to do a monthly subscription :)
Also, something is confusing in your ordering page. How many servings of coffee do I get for $19? I feel like that'd be useful information to have somewhere on the order page. Is it 8 cups of instant grounds? Or enough instant groups for 8 "cups" of coffee?
--
+ well actually, I am to try it out. But I won't mess with starting/canceling the subscription in the future. If you gave me a way to schedule things though, that would convert me for sure, assuming I enjoy the coffee.
A big part of our mission is serving coffee for everyone's need - we have some people who use it camping, we have others who use it on the way to work. There is room for both.
What would be really neat is if we learned exactly how much you need and sent you the right amount at the right time.
At most, send me a reminder email asking if I want to repeat last year's order.
Coffee is the most important thing my partner and I check to make sure we have before we enter the backcountry. And it's always instant, not out of preference or cost concerns, but weight.
You can like good coffee and be interested in good instant coffee.
Won't replace my whole-bean subscriptions, but will be a great way to get a good cup of coffee away from my home, and a great gift for my dad who likes instant coffee.
One suggestion: let us buy without a subscription, even if it costs 10-20 percent more. I don't want to subscribe to this service for the above reasons. :)
A pop-up store type experience in major coffee cities in N.America (including Canada pls.) would be a good way to get the word out about Sudden.
There might be some customer facing bigcos with a service component that might buy into this as a differentiator, especially in their premium cabins.
Edit: when you open a tube it will age much faster.
Things that taste bad in coffee might be: - dries out your mouth - watery/ tasteless - really bitter - tastes like wood - smokey/ burnt
FYI, it's hard to pick up on these taste characteristics if you drink coffee with cream and sugar, so if you want to do a taste test, try it black and at a warm (not hot) temperature.
For more information on the sensation of taste and all it's myriad complexities, you may want to check out these resources:
http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/medicalschool/dep... Sue is a world expert on taste, along with Tom Finger, and her work is excellent in every way.
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande... The bible of neural sciences, though thick and dense, the sections on gustation and olfaction may prove useful to your endeavors.
Edit: Here are some other resources on how to modify your taste sensation to better understand how your taste buds work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Taste_modifiers
There is also a supplement that you can take that will elliminate your sensation of sweet for a few hours, but I forget the name
Lastly, to understand umami, try getting a few bags of chips of similar salt content and hold your nose the entire time. One of just regular Lays potato chips, one of something like Doritos, and one of those baked Parmesan cheese ships from whole foods. While eating them with your nose held close, try to recognize the changes in the umami taste.
At Sudden's 8 cups for $19 it is CHEAPER for me to buy a quality pour over at the local cafe where they charge $2.25 a cup.
Also this appears to be targeting "coffee snobs"; most of that crowd isn't interested in instant coffee.
Edit: Definitely makes sense for you to go to your corner coffee shop. However, Sudden offers you an option to drink kick-ass coffee when you don't have access to any other option
//
Honest feedback, I hope you take it in the spirit it is given: Is there really no way to just order a sampler from you, without 'you will be automatically subscribed unless you cancel?' I straight up refuse to do subscriptions. The entire 'but you can cancel at any time!' model makes me think of low-quality, as-seen-on-TV crap, and is a strong negative in terms of my brand perception. Let your product stand on its own merit. If it's good, customers will come back. Like I said, if you posted a link where I could buy a one-time-only, no other actions required on my part sampler, I would buy it immediately. As it is, the 'your sampler becomes a sub unless you cancel' is just Another Thing to Deal With, and I already have enough of those. So do most other people.
I'm happy with my grind-and-pourover setup at home, but would love to have a reliable alternative for travel. I've tried to travel with Aeropress + handmill + beans, but it's only worth it for small town, remote area itineraries, whereas decent coffee is usually available in major metros. But for the times it isn't, or when staying with non-coffee friends, or for on the plane, or for rushing out the door, it would be great to have a decent backup option.
Is there a non-subscription / trial offer?
having said that, the primary reason i pound cold brew instead of making 2 or 3 aeropresses every morning is because i don't like boiling water, and grinding, and waiting, and cleaning up. some people find it all very mindful and relaxing and zen and whatever, but for me it's just a pain in the ass, so for me personally $2.50 for something i could just pay $1 (on average) in a big concentrated cold brew growler is perhaps a weird price point.
There's a lot of value add that Sudden is bringing to the table. Most obvious being sourcing, second being operations, third being logistics of getting the boxes to you, then lastly fourth--and most important--is marketing.
Coffee for the most part is bullshit, much like the wine industry. A small part of the audience want to hobnob about taste. For some reason everyone complains about Starbucks coffee or McDonalds coffee and somehow suddenly everyone knows what coffee gruel tastes like. The rest of the audience will just take what you craft and pour in milk and sugar to their liking, aka Philz.
Along with having so many people in the industry, cutting through the signal to convince you to remember the brand, to get you to try it, and to get you to believe it's superior is almost all the work.
On the global scale it's the equivalent of coffee farmers in Yunnan, China spending millions of dollars to convince you that Chinese coffee is just as good if not better than coffee from elsewhere like how wine people try to convince you something grown out of Napa or Champagne isn't good.
And to be fair the last time someone did this was some folks in South America using the marketing idea of a guy in a poncho and hat with his mule, and that worked really well.
So it's to say the challenge is process and marketing. Both are hard. But hard is good. Most people shy away from hard work to min-max their way through life.
Coffee people tend for the most part admire and adore hard work. It's the reason why they insist on doing things the long way, hard way, right way.
And that in turn is what makes this exciting.
But to flip it back, identifying the context of this was my aim.
1. Instant coffee is already a CPG thing you can buy off the shelf.
2. Then the preppers came up with the freeze drying.
3. And now someone is mechanizing it.
And it's going to be hard.
And whether that's going to be a better thing or not, well, maybe it wouldn't matter.
Techies could be drinking Ensure or Slimfast but instead they choose diarrhea-inducing Soylent because marketing is all that matters.
PS. Hard also means they're locked out of a lot of things. This won't be mainstream, there's no economies of scale for margins to give to retailers to have it be on shelves. And if and when they do upgrade to industrial scale they lose the hipster cache. Tough calls to be made, but either way hard is always more fun.
Yeah, those are all the real challenges we face. Marketing for us is a big one - as many people have pointed out about our website :-)
I think it's our job as a business to figure out a way to make it mainstream. It's going to take creativity, hard work, and a great tasting product - but that's the challenge we are signing up for to be honest. We are not here to make a niche product. Everything we are working towards is making this something the majority of people can enjoy. If you talked to my parents in the 70's, the idea of a Starbucks style cafe where you pay $5 for an iced latte was ludicrous, but now it's mainstream (I'm not saying its a ripoff either, its just something we didn't know we'd want).
What we see is a huge gap in the market. If you live in a select few big cities, you have this huge exposure to specialty coffee and it tastes great. If you live anywhere else - it is a whole lot harder to experience coffee that tastes this good. We believe that the average person truly does want to experience great tasting coffee - they just don't have access.
*Caveat that I always add - that doesn't mean there isn't room for other coffee either. McDonalds is a mainstream burger restaurant but there is still a place for 10 other fast food companies, a whole spectrum of high end burgers, etc. We aren't trying to replace every way to drink coffee - just provide a new alternative that tastes awesome.
Really enjoyed your comments - thanks for writing!
And yet, those often make the best businesses. Businesses that do not require extensive domain knowledge are easy to copy, businesses that have no 'moat' (barrier to entry) tend to be overrun by competition initiating a very early race to the bottom in price where the only thing that matters is to hit the largest possible scale as soon as you can.
Having a moat like this gives you breathing room, so cherish it.
Hard is good in startups.
Mr. Wonderful and Mr. Coffee will knock this off in μseconds if there's any traction.
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What's yield/power consumption etc. (for such a lower end consumer version). Anything else I should be aware of?
1) grind the coffee 2) brew it however you like 3) cool the coffee from 90C --> cold 4) freeze the coffee 5) freeze dry for 24-48 hours
Fundamentally this will work but you're likely to run into a few problems. Your yield is going to be pretty low - one batch will likely get you ≈10-15 cups. Secondly, that coffee is really hygroscopic, meaning that it's so dry that it will absorb any moisture from the air. Unless you keep it in vacuum pouches it'll turn into a rock within days.
So, it's in a paper wrapper bag with vintage font that displays a feel-good message? (Note: I'm susceptible to these kinds of marketing gags, but feel dirty when I buy something that turns out to be mediocre stuff.)
Through an anthropologist's lens, caffeine helps adapt unreliable human mental concentration to an industrial/capitalist society. (Just like ritalin and adderall!) See ern's comment regarding "forced to take coffee to keep up with my fellow developers". I've observed that coffee is the most common beverage (after water) which employers freely distribute in the workplace.
This said, many folks prefer a caffeinated existence and don't experience the side effects. If it works out for you, then enjoy it!
That said, I do get a day or three of withdrawl headaches if I go cold turkey these days. I recently went through a 4-5 week abstinence - not my first - but was extremely surprised when, this time, I temporarily became a morning person for the first 3 weeks of it. That's new. Then my schedule reverted to it's normal night owl behavior - presumably after deacclimatizing from my previous caffeine intake levels.
I'm not abstaining currently, but I am trying to keep it in moderation. My main source of caffeine comes with too much sugar (in the form of energy drinks), which I'm a bit more worried about. Fewer drinks, smaller drinks (e.g. consuming half portions), healthier & decoupled substitutes (real fruit for the sugar, tea for the caffeine.)
I never acquired a taste for coffee, for better or worse.
Do you have any evidence for this or is it a hmm-I-better-not-vaccinate-my-children-because-I-think-it-will-give-them-autism type statement?
I did, however, find this neat little article on the "myth" of adrenal fatigue, from Crossfit.[0]
There's a part that says caffeine overuse can trigger general fatigue (or adrenal fatigue as refereed to the alternative medicine crowd).
http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/CFJ_2015_07_Adrenal_Exa...
((Of-topic, are there any other good research aggregators besides Google Scholar?))
> On the flight back to Helsinki I was desperate for caffeine and ordered a coffee
Denial is a common sign of addiction :)
I am currently forced to drink Nestlé Gold Decaf and it is just barely tolerable. I don't know how your product compares but personally I would spring for anything better in a heartbeat, price be damned.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/05/is-sugar-wor...
In the early days of my work life I started drinking a cup of coffee here and there. It helps if you're tired in the afternoon, and I like the taste. Then I started having a cup after lunch since everyone else went for it. Not long after, I'd have a cup first thing in the morning, and not too long after that I would be a complete zombie without drinking coffee from the morning and into the afternoon.
It took hard work kicking that habit, but I did, only because: (1) I don't like having such a strong dependency, it just seems unhealthy, and (2) I become irritable and jumpy in the evening if I have had coffee during the day. Maybe I'm just more sensitive, I don't know.
It sucks because I love the taste of coffee. These days I have a big jar of Nestle Instant Decaf at my desk and I dip into that every other day, just because I miss the taste of coffee, for which the instant just barely qualifies, but those are the lengths I go to. Now, if someone would come up with a decent instant decaf I would happily throw my money at that.
For those who naysay the withdrawal, I've seen multiple people complain of debilitating cluster headaches after about 3 days of no coffee.
The other thing that I've seen is people who complain about anxiety, but start every day with 2 coffees. If you were injecting adrenaline and then complaining about anxiety you would be laughed out of the room, but for some reason with coffee it is acceptable.
Freeze dried coffee is already what Folgers does and sell you. This is the more artisanal version of that since the big brands have big factories that can pump out plenty of instant coffee grounds.
So this is a ramped up volume play on existing techniques perfected by the doomsday preppers. Youtube search for freeze dried coffee and you'll plenty of people explaining how to do it.
The freeze drying machines sell for $600 to $1000 from a variety of vendors. I think I figured out which one Sudden is using, it's the low end consumer version from Salt Lake City. They just have 20 of these in a SF warehouse somewhere.
From there it's just a method of scaling expensive capital costs, labor intensive processes, and maximizing the calculation of yield, and marketing enough to convince people that $2.50 for freeze dried coffee in a tube is a good deal.
That only works when relative to the crazy world of craft coffee people charging $5 or $7 for a pour over with the Keurig pods at $1.50 anchoring the bottom and buying a big can of coffee to make your own at $1 a carafe.