Instant coffee, often relegated to brownie recipes and steak rubs, is making a comeback and even winning grudging approval from connoisseurs.
. Walklet, who runs the Coffee Concierge blog, liked it but got a second opinion from a trusted critic — his wife, who has been known to compare coffee she dislikes to gasoline.
A handful of start-ups including Waka, “Instant is super convenient and portable,” says Jim Watson, a beverage analyst at Rabobank. “You can throw a couple in your bag and travel everywhere. Instant has always been weighed down by being seen as a really low-end product. These specialty guys are making instant coffee cool again.”
Instant was reimagined 10 years ago, when Starbucks introduced Via Ready Brew packets in an effort to sell more coffee in grocery stores. Via was made with 100% Arabica beans, cost less than $1 per cup and appealed to people on the go. Sales have been steady but have never really taken off, says John A. Quelch, dean of the Miami Business School at the University of Miami, who has done Starbucks case studies. “They didn’t put a tremendous amount of marketing muscle behind it,” he says.
Sudden, sold in plastic tubes containing 4.5 grams of coffee, can be mixed with hot or cold water. The company avoids the word “instant,” choosing instead to describe the product as “crystallized.” The 4-year-old San Francisco start-up has raised $5 million and is looking for more funding to ramp up capacity. Zloof said that he’s had talks with bigger companies and that it’s just a matter of time before Sudden inks partnerships.
“The quality has gotten significantly better,” Dunkin’ CEO Dave Hoffmann said. “Before any of that you’d probably rub it on your steak and put it on the grill. You wouldn’t drink that.”
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