Coffee always wins

Why are there so many coffee brands? Why do we often find companies marketing their products to be mixed in coffee? Or consumed alongside it? There’s something important to learn here for supplement brands, especially those with very new, cutting edge ingredients or use cases. Read on to make sure you don’t make some of the mistakes I did!

In the USA, people have been drinking coffee since time immemorial.

Okay, it’s a young country, so perhaps only a few hundred years. All you need to know here, is that it is ubiquitously available, and consumed by over 60% of Americans.

Although energy drinks have edged in on some of coffee’s market share, it is still the king. Think of the brand recognition: Starbucks, Dunkin’, Folgers, Nescafe, Keurig - the list is endless. And there’s a coffee brand for every budget and every moment. On the go? Starbucks. At home and saving money? Folgers. At home and balling out? Maybe Illy from your $1000+ espresso machine.

When I started my company in the powdered hydration space, investors asked us questions like: “what is the usage occasion?”, “how do people know they are dehydrated and need your product?”. With the naïveté of a first time founder, I shrugged off many of these questions and cracked on with building (a blessing and a curse).

Why coffee brands just make sense:

Over time, I’ve come to realize there is something to those questions, and coffee helps to explain it:

If I start a coffee brand tomorrow, let’s call it “Magic Beans”, I don’t have to explain to you when to consume it, or even how to consume it. The form factor will give you the info you need. It’s whole beans, so you know you’ll need a grinder. And maybe we also have a K-cup sku so we can get Keurig users as customers as well.

A new coffee brand slides right into your routine. I just have to tell you why my Magic Beans are better than whatever you’re drinking today. Maybe it’s a story about taste. Maybe it’s sustainability. Or maybe it’s something charitable and feel good. But that’s really it. You’ll try it. If you like it, or like the story enough, you’ll buy it again. But I don’t have to explain to you what coffee is to get that first purchase. I just have to explain why my coffee is great.

With some categories of supplements, if you’re early enough in the cycle, you need to explain to people why they need it and when to take it. You then also need to explain to them why yours is the best. It’s a very different problem to launching a coffee brand. In the darker moments of building my first company I used to lament that I didn’t just launch a coffee brand - many aspects of the business would have been much simpler.

Nailing the “why” and the “when” of consumption

Of course, if you nail the why, and the when for your supplement, as well as why yours is the best, you can build a differentiated business with a moat. But you can’t forget that there are two parts: educating the consumer, and then also selling them on why your product/brand is the right one for them.

The truth is, I love educating customers, and trying out different stories about ingredients and formulas to see which resonate with customers. Building a coffee brand isn’t the right job for me as I love functional products.

If you can remove just one of those questions for your supplement, it will make your marketing messaging much easier. For example, arguably Vital Proteins was able to grow so rapidly because they anchored their product as a coffee additive. People didn’t have to ask when to consume it. It was obvious. That left only two things for the brand to explain, why, and why Vital Proteins was the best for them.

Arguably Pre-workout fits with this definition as well. It’s in the name. You take it right before you workout. I would say that this category is later stage now so most people are familiar with it, but in the early days that positioning would have made it much easier to sell.

Takeaways for your brand:

So as you design your product, is there an existing product category or consumer behavior that you can anchor to? If it’s a new type of product with novel benefits, if you can remove some of the other questions consumers have, your path to adoption will be smoother!