Avacajoe is a line of RTD coffees that blend cold brew coffee with avocado milk to create the first “avocado coffee.” The product line is packaged in 7.5 oz cans and available in three flavors: Dark Roast, Vanilla and Mocha.

The products are made with the company’s “Avocado Base,” which includes water, avocado oil and avocado powder, as well as cold brew coffee, monk fruit, Himalayan salt, natural flavors, dipotassium phosphate and either organic guar gum or gellan gum. There is no added sugar and the products have 100-120 calories, 1 gram of sugar, 10 grams of fat as well as 1 gram of fiber, 1 mg of iron, and 135 mg of caffeine.

When it comes to flavor, all three of the products are rich, creamy, moderately sweet, and have plenty of coffee flavor. The avocado base does have a light avocado flavor to it, but if you haven’t had avocado powder before you might not recognize it (it certainly doesn’t taste like guacamole, which is what many people will probably think of). There’s also a fair amount of sweetener aftertaste, which is definitely something that they need to work on. We do, however, like the touch of salt to it – this does a nice job of helping to bridge the gap between the avocado and coffee flavors.

The Dark Roast flavor, which is presumably the “original” flavor if there were one, is probably a bit too sweet tasting for our liking. It’s more of a sweetened latte drink than a drink for coffee purists, which is what we were expecting with the name Dark Roast. Renaming it would be one approach to fixing this or they could dial back (or omit) the sweetness.

For Mocha and Vanilla, both are quite tasty and add another layer of familiar flavor to the mix. However, in the case of Mocha there was some separation in the product. Overall, we wonder if flavors will help the value proposition or make it too complicated.

Moving on to the branding and messaging, Avacajoe’s packaging features a matte finish shrink sleeve label with a mix of green, gray and black color palettes. The Avocajoe logo, which features an avocado shape for the first “o” in “avocado,” sits near the top and is one of the label’s smaller elements. Below are the primary elements: the words avocado coffee in all capitals split up across three lines in “AVO,” “CADO,” and “COFFEE.” Finally, at the bottom is a green band that contains the flavor name, the product description (“cold brew coffee with avocado m*lk”), and callouts promoting “half an avocado of healthy fats” as well as the caffeine content. 

In our opinion, we think that the focus on avocado is so strong that it undermines the development of the brand as a whole. Moreover, it doesn’t tell you why you’d even want avocado in your coffee. This is something that we think is pretty important, considering that most consumers are quite particular about how they take their coffee and because it’s not a natural flavor pairing. 

That being said, we’d love to see the large capital letters on the front label replaced with something that makes the brand pop a bit more.  Help invite the consumer in – tell them what the benefits are and why they’ll like the product. In addition, making it more clear that it’s made with avocado milk – and not just avocado – will probably help. 

Overall, Avocajoe is definitely one of the more interesting plant-based coffee products that we’ve seen and tasted. But it still needs some refinement before it can reach its full potential.