Body Coffee
Year
December 2022 - November 2024
Overview
I co-founded a coffee company and ran it for two years with my partner, Daisy Dunlap.
At Body Coffee, we made ready-to-drink, naturally low-caffeine cold brew coffee. You can read our story below.
Role
Co-Founder
Introduction
“If you continue down this path, you’ll end up in the cemetery littered with thousands of failed businesses.” Daisy and I exchanged uneasy glances. We had sat down with Alvaro Ortega, cofounder of Jibby Coffee, a brand that had transitioned from selling CBD-infused cold brew cans to mushroomy coffee powders. We had sought the conversation to understand the funding and distribution landscape for our small coffee project, Body Coffee. Instead, we were met with a prognosis of doom.
Alvaro’s case was airtight: CPG margins are bleak, glass bottles easily break, and distributors are looking for shelf-stable, non-seasonal products. You get one shot on a grocer’s shelf — if you don’t sell, you’re never getting back on.
This warning did not work on Daisy and I. The typical advice given to entrepreneurs is to fall in love with your problem, not your solution, but we were already head over heels for our product: low-caffeine cold brew coffee, bottled in cute glass flasks. We loved making it in our quaint commercial kitchen, based out of a pie shop in Park Slope, and we loved our slogan, cold brew for hot people. Mostly, we wanted to see how far we could take Body, failure be damned.
Now, we have officially reached the end of our project, two years after it started. In the process, we sold thousands of dollars of coffee, volunteered on Guatemalan coffee farms, landed on a hypebeast grocery shelf, and learned lessons that you can only acquire through carting heavy coffee equipment around NYC sans voiture. I expect that many of you reading this case study will simply ignore my nuggets of wisdom in favor of learning these lessons yourself. It’s a canon event — you may proceed.
Beginnings
My cold brew origin story began in 2017. The summer before college, I learned how easy it was to make gallons of cold brew using the Toddy™ method during my stint at a Jersey Shore café. In college, I interned at Commonwealth Joe Coffee Roasters, finding customers for their turnkey office cold brew program. The pandemic hit, and I experimented with making cold brew at home using a French Press. I graduated from college and began my career in ‘innovation’ consulting. My first client was a beverage brand looking for the next big thing; I spent hours combing through grocery refrigerators, trying one nasty adaptogenic drink after the next.
Classically, my first big job came with big anxiety, which worsened my IBS symptoms. I had to cut out caffeine to stave off the worst effects. But I loved my daily coffee, and the sacrifice left me bitter. Around this same time, Daisy was coming to terms with her own ADHD-fueled anxiety. Coffee made her heart race, faster than even I could make it go. But we refused to consider coffee alternatives like matcha or MUD/WTR, and decaf was actually worse for our tummies due to its heightened acidity. We started looking for an answer to our woes. I had honed my beverage consultation skills and was ready to ask the dreaded question, “How hard could it be?”
Research
In an effort to collect primary research, we put together a very professional Typeform survey ($30 cost) asking questions about coffee preferences and caffeine intake that would steer our venture. 188 of our dearest friends and family responded, leaving us with a few key takeaways:
89.3% of our respondents drink coffee — only 1.1% claimed to not consume ANY sources of caffeine.
78.6% of our respondents reported experiencing negative side effects from caffeine.
31.1% of our respondents measure caffeine consumption in cups of coffee, meaning coffee has become a standard metric for caffeine despite its variance.
At-home consumption is the most common, with ready-to-drink registering as an impulse purchase (not even once per week for most respondents).
Convenience and flavor were the most important aspects of coffee, followed by routine, energy and focus.
We tested six hypotheses, which were ranked in the following order:
A circular economy operating model, where materials are recollected and nothing is wasted
Air-roasted beans, which removes highly acidic compounds in traditional coffee
Caffeine transparency, or knowing the exact caffeine dosage per serving
Delicious coffee syrups, infused with unique global flavors
Coconut water-infused coffee, increasing hydration, pH, and body of the coffee
Naturally low-caffeine coffee, without a decaffeination process that strips flavor
Through our research, we successfully validated the problem space. However, looking back, we pursued the hypothesis with the least appeal in the most unpopular consumption format. Using this research, even I could have predicted our downfall.
Fieldwork
A few months after launching the survey, Daisy and I decided to get closer to our subject by living in Costa Rica for a month, touring coffee farms in the mountains and drinking arabica from traditional choreadors.
While Daisy returned home, I took two weeks to volunteer on a Guatemalan coffee farm as a digital media specialist. I ran around making Instagram Reels, testing my strength against huge bags of pergamino, and practicing Q-grader cupping techniques.
I came away understanding each step of the coffee supply chain and how to purchase it from ethical suppliers, something I felt was immensely critical in this extractive industry.
Production
Our search for a less-destructive coffee led us to an interesting discovery: Laurina. A mutation of the bourbon variety, Laurina coffee naturally contains only 30–50% of the caffeine of a traditional bean.
We learned that coffee plants employ high caffeine levels as a natural pesticide. Because Laurina is grown at such a high altitude, the plant has no need to divert its energy to insect defense and is able to focus instead on making delicious beans. Unfortunately for us, this also makes Laurina less durable and more difficult to grow. Therefore, Laurina is some of the most expensive coffee on the planet. We found an amazing vendor, Blue Hummingbird Coffee Roasters, based out of Irvine, California, that was able to source Laurina and other low-caffeine varietals. We began experimenting with extraction ratios, and soon were producing the smoothest cold brew we’ve ever had, without a hint of bitterness, while still experiencing a mild caffeine sensation. It was delightful — we knew we had our product.
We bought grinders, funnels, coffee bins, filters, and began production — first in our beautiful Fort Greene kitchen, then in the commercial kitchen of Four & Twenty Blackbirds for $32/hour.
Branding
Daisy and I spent three hours at a coffee shop, going through a naming exercise that I had lifted from my innovation consultancy. We conducted a competitive audit of names (Wandering Bear, Chameleon, La Colombe, RISE, SToK, Stumptown, Grady’s), and decided to go with something more modern, feminine, and evocative, given our established demographic of women with stomach problems.
We created brand territories from which to ideate, and ended up with some solidly terrible names (Jugs, Coco Brew, Brew Mommy, Babe Coffee). In the end, we went with Body Coffee (referred to internally as BoCo) due to its musicality and brand relevance. We defined our core values as light, sexy, and sustainable.
We designed the brand’s imagery and logo in Figma using deep pinks and purples contrasted with swooping white line drawings and a bouncy font called Aloevera. We went through countless iterations of our label and did our first product photography in our friend’s studio for $200.
Timeline
The goal of our work, aside from solving a tricky caffeine problem, was to get more involved in our Brooklyn community. In fact, Body Coffee’s debut event was the Wallabout Wonderland Holiday Market, held in a Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse.
We quickly incorporated as an LLC, passed our food safety license exams, procured food vendor insurance, and got to brewing. We set up our booth in quiet anticipation, knowing that we could flop heavily as a cold beverage vendor at a winter event. But we surprisingly sold almost $500 of product, especially our specialty beverages like Moroccan caramel and peppermint mocha cold brew.
With a little more confidence, we started bottling our cold brew and selling to our Instagram followers in limited drops of 20 bottles. We rented a Zipcar for delivery, which we quickly realized was not a scalable solution. Shipping bottles was no better, as we discovered during a giveaway gone awry. We recognized that we could only pursue a few channels, like curated grocery or retail partnerships.
We did a few more events, including a pop up with our friend’s fashion startup, Hauteline, as well as our much anticipated launch party, hosted for free by our favorite coffee shop in Greenpoint, Hide & Seek. We also did a few events with Industrious, Daisy’s coworking space in Prospect Heights.
It was around this time that we got a call back from Pop Up Grocer, a brand discovery marketplace in SoHo. They shared with us that we had made it onto their fridge shelf as a Summer Rotation Partner, our first sign of commercial viability. We were stoked outta our goddamn gourds.
Our first purchase order with PUG was for 72 bottles, 36 of each of our two SKUs (16 oz. boston rounds and 200 mL flasks). We worked diligently through the weekend, developing our bottle sealing technology and working through a few crises, as we had never made an order so large.
After dropping off our bottles and eagerly refreshing PUG’s embedded analytics dashboard, our excitement dwindled over the course of the ten weeks as orders slowly trickled in. We were in the midst of moving apartments, starting and losing jobs, and becoming tired of our relationship being reduced to one of constant logisticking.
Wrapping Up
I remind myself, once in a while, of the founder of Instacart who started 20 companies before his one great success. Although we’re hanging up our coffee-stained aprons, we have approximately 19 more tries to catch up to him. But by my standards, BoCo was a roaring success. It was the praxis of my consulting work mixed with creativity, love, and stomach problems. We kept it light, sexy, and sustainable. And next time, we’ll keep it up.