on the side of...

Closing in on two years ago, for a long time, I've wanted to start a brand and have had lots of ideas, some crazy ideas.

And then over the last couple of years, we've seen a really big rise in functional drinks and a huge rise in functional mushroom coffee brands.

And I was drinking those.

I decided I didn't like the taste of mushroom coffee, but I knew that putting... healthy or great ingredients into coffee was something people really liked and you saw the rise in that the big rise in organic foods and even big rise in functional so for me i was saying hey what can i do that's a little different that can find a niche of people who also don't love mushroom coffee but want to have a daily habit that they love still tastes like coffee but gives them a little bit added benefits and i thought about this a long time you know tried different um tried different ingredients and we figured out really to land on mostly coffee, right? We're 93% coffee, or 5% cacao.

And then we have a 3% mix of, or really 2% to 3% mix of turmeric, Ceylon cinnamon, ginger, chaga, and cayenne.

And what we did there, we said, hey, what are all those doing for you? And what they're doing for you is they're providing anti-inflammatory benefits.

Um, I mean,

But for people who may be wanting to do a similar thing, how do you do that? And how do you run your business now to where you don't have to be doing everything?

So it's the question I asked myself when I started because I have to have a job right now and I knew that there's no way.

for me to ever leave a job until I had a certain number of income.

And, you know, I don't even plan on leaving my job.

I like my job too right now, right? This is definitely a side hustle that's growing at like a, you know, a hundred percent rate.

And, you know, a few years from now, who knows, right? But right now it's not there.

And so I have, as I have a family and not everybody listening obviously has a family, but you have other activities you're doing, right? And you also want to start a career that you can build a career and not feel too far behind either.

you know, what

What actually makes your business stand out and what makes it different?

Yeah, it's a good question because, right, we know coffee is like, the market is massive and the competition is massive, right? Anytime you have an industry that's so big, there's going to be an immense amount of competition.

So how can we have a niche that people want to consume our coffee and come back over and over again? You know, there are probably other healthy coffees out there that are just maybe just as healthy.

I don't think there's any coffees out there that are healthier.

We do a few things with our coffee.

So first and foremost, we have all organic ingredients, right? So if you think about coffee or if you don't know much of coffee, some of the most pesticide ridden crops in the world, as people have continued to drink more and more and more coffee, they need the yield of the coffee to continue to stay up and even go higher.

So in order to do that, they need to spray conventional coffee and they need to make sure bugs aren't on the coffee.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

They were a coffee manufacturer.

They had an organic certification already, but they'd never done spices.

So I think a big lesson here is, at least for our case, like, we really wanted to do this, and we knew we couldn't do it in the kitchen or hire our...

Get, we have a job.

We just kept saying, "Hey, guys, here's our thoughts.

We will buy some of the equipment." So there was $1,000 equipment spend to get, like, a, a grinder in for our stuff, 'cause they wouldn't touch it with their machines, or a blender.

So you're doing a good job with that stuff.