Page 38 - Food&Drink July 2019

FOOD PACKAGING
Just a spoonful of coffee
Most of us think of sugar and milk as additives for our morning coffee, but Beforeyouspeak Coffee takes that to another level. Kim Berry talks to one of the founders about how they decided adding collagen to your cup of joe was a good idea, and one of its suppliers, Multipack, on helping to get the product to market.
WHEN friends Ash Bissett and Jaryd Terkelson decided to turn their habit of putting additives into their coffee “to get more out of it” into an actual product, Beforeyouspeak Coffee was born.
The two then set about developing a premium instant coffee product, with additives that improve health, wellbeing and performance. “Our whole concept is to use coffee as a vehicle to address various health, wellbeing and performance issues,” Bissett says.
He had worked in sports nutrition for a decade and told Food & Drink Business it was a natural progression to look at developing a brand. “We are both quite entrepreneurial and familiar with the health and wellness space. We did further research and absolutely no-one else was doing anything like it,” Bissett says.
“Subsequently we’ve discovered people add lots of weird things to their coffee like peanut butter. We looked at popular and trending ingredients, so our first product – One OG – has single origin Colombian coffee, medium chain triglycerides, turmeric, Siberian ginseng, green coffee
bean extract, stevia and black pepper. And the collagen range came out because it is so huge at the moment.”
For Bissett, it was about looking at a problem or issue they wanted to solve, the ingredients they wanted to use and then seeing where that went. Their industry contacts meant the two were able to “piece it together pretty
start-ups. “The functional beverage space is a booming market segment, so we were keen to help Beforeyouspeak get started. Unfortunately, we see many start-ups come to us and many don’t make it very far. We would love to help them all but of course we can’t, so we had to develop a thorough evaluation process to decide which start-ups we would support.
“ Our whole concept is to use coffee as a vehicle to address various health and wellbeing issues. We’ve discovered people add lots of weird things to their coffee.”
quickly” with suppliers sourcing ingredients from around the world.
One of their suppliers put them in touch with contract manufacturer and packaging company Multipack to find a packaging solution that reflected the premium branding as well as ensuring product integrity.
Multipack sales and marketing director Brad Devine says the pair passed the company’s screening process for
“Suffice to say, Ash and Jaryd passed with flying colours and have gone from strength to strength. It has been exciting to work on a great product in a booming market, with a couple of young blokes out to make a difference. We’ve invested in some purpose-built sachet equipment for them, with some exciting new developments in the pipeline,” Devine says.
Beforeyouspeak Coffee has nine product lines available online and in retail stores. ✷
38 | Food&Drink business | July 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au