Blue Bottle, the Company That Won't Grind Your Coffee, Now Sells Ground Coffee

The nuance is that the coffee is ground in a facility that minimizes exposure to oxygen (the biggest contributor to making coffee go stale), then the grounds are packaged and sealed into individual serving bags offered at various grind sizes for different brewing methods. They are sold at $3.50 a piece which, in my opinion is high, almost the same price as a pour over in-house but without the line.

If they have one trick that makes a venture-level return in the coffee business, my bet is this is it.

Neil Day started a company called Perfect Coffee back in 2014, mission to disrupt distribution by creating a vacuum sealed individual package of ground coffee. He tested it with one of the top coffee roaster and retailer in Silicon Valley (not Philz, Philz is just bad coffee) then sold the business to Blue Bottle in 2015.

Blue Bottle around the same time was experimenting with mail order coffee like other companies as a sizable chunk of revenue from a steady and stable monthly subscription is too hard to pass up.

Fast forward to now and the goal is three folds with these third wave hipster cafes: adapt or die.

The hipster cafes create innovation but Starbucks sets the pace in the coffee QSR world. Things like dialed-in coffee extraction, mobile order ahead, fancy half a milli renovations, gift carding, all of which are opportunities.

Two main trends are cropping up with mail order coffee: one is freeze drying (like what the preppers do) and the other is going with expensive investments into equipment like what Blue Bottle is doing at the ~$3 price point.