Humblemaker Coffee Co. (Discontinued)

While Humblemaker Coffee Co. has a traditional RTD cold brew as part of its product lineup, the California company’s more unique offering are its three functional cold brew coffee shots. Packaged in a 2 oz. jar that’s typically used for pills or capsules, these perishable, unpasteurized products offer a different approach to the shot category.

The three SKUs include Boomtowne Original, Black Sea Turkish Cold Brew and La Fonda Mexican Cold Brew. Each variety is paired with a functional blend: B vitamins, biotin, and folate for Original; a cognitive blend with L-theanine and panax ginseng for the Turkish Cold Brew; and a green tea, vitamin C, and antioxidant blend for the Mexican Cold Brew. All of the products are free of any sweeteners and contain zero calories.

From a taste perspective, these products are intense but smooth and fit the profile of what you’d expect from a cold brew coffee shot. Original is unflavored and offers the cleanest taste, while the Turkish blend, which features cardamom and clove, and the Mexican blend, which features cinnamon and cacao, both deliver flavors that are complementary rather than something that takes center stage. If we had to pick a favorite, we’d probably choose La Fonda as the cacao note adds another layer of complexity that we didn’t find in the other two.

While the flavor is good, the real story about this product is the packaging and approach to using functional ingredients. The latter is also a key part of the label, which features a band around the top of the label that lists out the core functional ingredients in capital letters. The rest of the label features text that’s quite small and which is, in some cases, such as the ingredients list, truly too small to read. You’ll also have to examine the bottle closely just to find the words “cold brew shot.”

From our perspective, the current execution needs some work so that consumers recognize it as a beverage product rather than a supplement -- especially since certain types of supplement capsules, such as probiotics, are often merchandised in a refrigerated set. 

Our suggestion is that Humblemaker starts by trying to better balance functionality and coffee. Thanks to the choice of packaging and the label design, we think it skews way too far towards the functional side. If the brand were to make the lower region that contains the Humblemaker logo and the copy that describes the coffee larger, we think this would be a helpful change.

Overall, this is a unique and, for the most part, enjoyable effort to innovate the cold brew coffee category.  Like any new idea, there’s some fine tuning to be done, but Humblemaker is generally on the right track.

Humblemaker Coffee Co. is a California-based company that produces high quality coffee products. Beyond that, the company is also cause-oriented, with both membership in 1% for the Planet and the creation of a “#tenforautism” campaign that puts 10 percent of the company's annual profits into programs that enrich the lives of children with autism.

Still, none of this really matters if the product isn’t good and the company isn’t successful. While we can’t really predict the company’s fortunes, the product is quite tasty.

We sampled two varieties, Little Victory and Bright White, both of which are made with fairtrade and organic ingredients. Little Victory is a classic unsweetened and unflavored offering, with full-bodied, balanced flavor. Slightly nutty,with notes of chocolate, it’s very easy to consume. But for us, Bright White is really the standout of the pair. Bright White blends water, organic coffee, organic hemp milk, and organic sugar to create something that’s really delicious. It’s rich and creamy, but maintains a nice bold coffee flavor, too. And being dairy-free is definitely a plus.

On the outside, the company has chosen a 7.2 oz. dark amber glass bottle. It’s small, which could be an issue when compared with  the competition, but they’ve done a nice job of making the product look premium and polished. We’d even call it to the point where it’s eye catching. Still, we think there’s some potential for refinement in the messaging.

Both products seem to miss key attributes of what’s inside the bottle: Little Victory doesn’t state that it’s straight cold-brew coffee while Bright White doesn’t state that it’s dairy free. In both cases, you’ll have to read the ingredients panel, which is something that the consumer shouldn’t have to do. In the case of Little Victory, which has a more cluttered look than its counterpart, reducing the copy -- and perhaps even getting rid of “Little Victory” as it isn’t overly descriptive -- would be a good place to start.  

In addition, we’d love to see Humblemaker add USDA Organic certification to the mix. The product has both USDA Organic (and supposedly Fair Trade) ingredients and this would definitely help the product stand out further.

Lastly, we’re sort of wondering what the real point of differentiation is for Humblemaker. The products are definitely at a level of quality, flavor, and attractiveness that puts them on par with other brands, but there seems to be something lacking that would really push us over the edge to choose Humblemaker over one of the other premium cold-brews out there (and there are no shortage of them). Figuring out the answer to that is, at least from our perspective, a key piece of just how successful and scalable the product can be.