Hello hello!!! Welcome back to the newsletter!! Guess I came up with something else to say!
Figured it makes sense to kick things off with the basics: why on earth did we start an instant coffee company?
Well, it would have made sense to start with that, but instead it is going to be the topic of newsletter 2. Hey, I can’t be perfect!
Why we started an instant coffee company
As a society, we have deeply normalized drinking horrible coffee (cough airplanes cough plastic home-brew machines cough hotels), paying $8 for coffee (RIP charging my almond milk cappuccino to my corporate card), or unknowingly drinking the craziest ingredients by way of your plant-based milk or coffee creamer (the new-age version of a horror movie: read the ingredient label on your coffee creamer… it ain’t good!!).
So this begs the question: why are we making so many sacrifices on something so many of us are drinking every single day? And sometimes multiple times a day!!
And this is not me pointing fingers. I am a massive coffee addict and also a massive coffee snob. Yet I was constantly doing all three of these things: drinking bad coffee when it was all I could get, spending $8 on my daily coffee, and drinking random cr$p because it was what was available to me.
So, as two people obsessed with coffee, this sent Michael and me down a deep rabbit hole.
What are the options for good, clean-label coffee that don’t cost $1,000,000???
It must exist, right? Instant coffee is insanely popular in so many other parts of the world. Surely we just haven’t found the good stuff here yet!?
Wrong.
Everywhere we looked, it didn’t seem to exist. There were either ingredient lists we didn’t love, an insane price tag, or, let’s face it… it was kinda icky.
So we did what any logical person would do.
Quit your cushy tech job and begin mixing nondescript powders in your kitchen to see if you could make it yourself.
We spent the next month trying hundreds of coffee beans and mixing more cups of coffee than I would like to count, using only ingredients we could pronounce, of course (cue, breaking bad meme).
The goal was to come up with two drinks we actually loved: one with the “creamer” built in and one black. Both had to be genuinely good with nothing more than water added.
And remember, we came from the world of charging your coffee to a company card, so our standards were quite high.
Eventually, we landed on two drinks we genuinely loved: the Café Au Lait & Americano.
Then we needed to pressure test them.
So we went out onto the streets of New York with jars of unlabeled powder and started offering cups to strangers.
As I type that sentence out, trust me, I realize how insanely sketchy this sounds. Hindsight 20/20?
BUT even under those slightly questionable circumstances, people kept trying it and telling us things like:
“I didn’t know instant coffee could taste this good.”
“I love how creamy it is. It tastes like my coffee shop order.”
“I can’t believe this tastes better than the coffee I make at home.”
And with that, Brissta was born: convenient, delicious coffee made with only ingredients you can pronounce.
A daily habit you can feel good about.
We’ve learned a lot from our prior jobs that has helped us in this new venture and DANG have we learned a ton since starting.
We are so excited to keep going on our mission to ~~make instant coffee cool again and help you romanticize and improve just a small part of your day :)
Random Musing
This is not going to be anything all that groundbreaking, BUT I am going to say it anyway because hey, this is my newsletter!! And it is what I am currently musing on!!
(Musing on? Musing about? Who knows.)
One thing that has really blown my mind through both formulating Brissta AND figuring out how to get it manufactured is just how hard it is to make a clean-label instant latte.
Before doing this, I never really knew what emulsifiers did.
I knew I didn’t particularly want them in my food, but what do they actually DO??
Well, formulating Brissta certainly taught me. Among other things, they make it a whole lot easier to create that creamy, smooth mouthfeel you want in something like a latte.
Which presented a slightly annoying problem when we had already decided we didn’t want to use them.
There were definitely moments when it would have been tempting to abandon the clean-label promise, throw an emulsifier in, solve the problem, and move on with our lives.
BUT we held strong and eventually found the balance we wanted using oat powder to help us get that creamy mouthfeel naturally.
And don’t even get me started on the manufacturing side of things.
We spoke to SO many manufacturers who basically told us our Café Au Lait was too clean to package the way we wanted.
Which, on one hand: yay?
On the other hand: terrifying?? (read our account of this horror here)
Enter Michael’s most recent side experiment: building a machine to manufacture our Café Au Lait sticks ourselves.
More on that later though!!
Okay!! That’ll do it!!
Thanks for reading and, as ya know… I’ll be back when I have something new to say :)
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