Quokka Brew Jitterless Coffee

Ready-to-drink “jitter-less” coffee maker Quokka recently added a second SKU its product lineup: a first-of-its-kind combination of cereal milk and an oat milk latte. 

Similar to their flagship Vanilla Oat Milk Latte, Chocolate Cereal Milk Latte features Fair Trade coffee and oat milk and is sweetened with a blend of sugar, monk fruit and erythritol, with the end result being 60 calories and 5 grams of sugar per (how many oz?) can. 

The “jitter-less” part comes in with the addition of green tea extract, L-theanine and ginseng to complement the 135 mg of caffeine. Cocoa and added flavorings create the chocolate cereal milk flavor. 

Inside the can, the latte itself has a moderately creamy body that definitely tastes like chocolate cereal flavored milk. There’s a note of coffee, but it’s rather mild and provides more of a secondary flavor. 

The sweetness is also light, although there is a sweetener aftertaste that we also noticed in our review of the Vanilla Oat Milk Latte. This is definitely something that could be improved – although it’s not that far off from where we think it needs to be.

As for the branding, we still like the approachable and playful approach that we mentioned in the previous review. However, unlike the original, this product has a more complicated message and hierarchy. The label presently reads “jitter-less coffee,” “cereal oat milk latte,” and finally “chocolate delight.”  These are components that don’t intuitively go together and breaking them apart, rather than having one cohesive message, forces you to have to stop and read to put it all together.  If cereal milk lattes are going to be a part of Quokka’s future lineup, we feel that delivering this in a more succinct way would be beneficial.

Ultimately, we really like Quokka’s creativity in this product. Putting  the flavor of cereal milk into a latte is something that’s new to us and we appreciate that they’ve done it in a way that stays on-trend with consumer preferences in the coffee category  thanks to the addition of oat milk and functional ingredients. With a little refinement in its execution, help Quokka find its niche in the RTD coffee set.

Quokka Brew is a ready-to-drink coffee beverage that is positioned as offering a “jitterless” drinking experience. The product presently comes in an 8 oz can in a single variety, Vanilla Oat Milk Latte.

The product’s formulation is a blend of oat milk and Fair Trade coffee that has been enhanced with green tea extract, L-theanine and ginseng. It’s sweetened with a blend of sugar, erythritol, and monk fruit and has 60 calories and 5 grams of sugar per can. 

So how does Quokka achieve a jitterless formulation? According to the company, their patent pending blend (using the previously mentioned functional ingredients) has been carefully crafted and balanced to eliminate the ups and downs that you’d typically get from a product with high levels of caffeine (there is 135 mg of caffeine in each can). But it’s honestly quite hard to say whether or not it works as designed.

Moving from function to flavor, Quokka tastes pretty familiar and is very much in the ballpark of a mainstream RTD vanilla latte. The coffee is full bodied but smooth, while the oat milk has a rich body and, fortunately, lacks the scalded flavor that is so common in dairy based RTD lattes. There’s some good flavor in Quokka’s base that could certainly translate well into other flavor extensions.

However, this particular combination of flavor and sweetener needs some work. There’s a pretty good amount of vanilla flavoring and a moderate amount of sweetness, which is fine, but they both need refinement in their execution. It’s hard to say if there’s anything inherently wrong with the vanilla (aside from it clearing being from flavoring) but, when paired with the blend of sweeteners, it combines to create something that quickly overwhelms your palate and lingers afterwards. Whatever the reason, this is definitely an area where the product can be improved.

On the packaging side of things, Quokka’s 8 oz. can features a shrink sleeve label with an orange, brown, and white color palette that’s synonymous with the coffee category. The brand Quokka is named after the quokka,a wallaby that’s native to Australia; also the primary visual element on the label in illustrated form, it looks like a cross between a kangaroo and a squirrel. 

Otherwise, the label has a pretty straightforward top-to-bottom hierarchy that does a good job of calling out what the product is and its key attributes. The only thing that really isn’t explained all that well is the claim of being “jitterless,” while the callouts regarding the function are less dominant than the rest of the visual elements thanks to the use of white text on an orange background. The pieces appear to be there, but there isn’t a direct or intuitive statement on this so the consumer has to connect the dots that L-theanine, green tea, and ginseng -- used at the exact levels in the can -- are the source. 

From our perspective, if Quokka is going to use jitterless as its key point of differentiation, we think they need to lean into this a bit more both in terms of how they back this up and how it is visually incorporated into the design. 

In the end, Quokka is a nice first effort from a startup company that we think has come up with a unique and meaningful point of differentiation, assuming it can be backed up; Some fine tuning of this SKU will certainly help. We think the brand needs to think about expanding into other flavors to reach a broader audience beyond just consumers of vanilla flavored lattes.  If you are interested in tea and coffee specials, you should know Woolworths catalogue is one of two the most popular catalogues there.