US-based nut-free spreads and cocoa-free chocolate producer Voyage Foods has entered the drinks market with a new alternatives product – beanless coffee.
It is being sold to commercial foodservice and manufacturing channels worldwide, the company told Just Drinks.
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The coffee alternative is more than 40% cheaper than conventional coffee, according to the company, “providing coffee manufacturers with price stability that results in significantly better margins”.
Voyage Foods’ product is made from a mixture of roasted chickpeas, water, rice hulls and other “natural flavours”, brought together using “proprietary technology”. Caffeine in the drink has been sourced from green tea.
The product is being sold as both caffeinated and decaffeinated in ground, liquid, concentrate, and instant formats. It comes in dark and medium roast variants.
“Given the current dynamics of the coffee market, food and beverage suppliers are uneasy about supply-chain volatility as well as fulfilling their triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit,” Adam Maxwell, the CEO of Voyage Foods, said in a statement.
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By GlobalData“There will always be a place for premium, fair-trade, single-origin coffee, and that’s not our target – we intend to make the biggest possible impact, and we’ll do that by supplying an eco-friendlier, ethically made alternative to commodity coffee.”
Voyage Foods produces a range of nut-free spreads sold to consumers in the US via retail channels including Walmart and Amazon.
The group also makes cocoa-free chocolate for foodservice customers and food manufacturers. Earlier this year, agri-food major Cargill partnered with the company to be its global business-to-business distributor.
Voyage Foods enters a very niche, albeit growing, beanless coffee market. It sits alongside a clutch of players that include US-based Atomo and Minus, Singapore’s Prefer and Dutch group Northern Wonder.
These producers have attracted investor interest amid growing concerns around the supply and pricing of traditional coffee. In February, Prefer bagged $2m in seed funding, while in December 2023, Atomo secured investment from drinks major Suntory Holdings, bringing its total amount raised to date to $53.2m.
Like Voyage Foods, these start-ups are also using natural ingredients, with many using a mixture of upcycled ingredients like chicory, dates, barley and legumes and implementing fermentation technology to create their brews. Similarly, Atomo and Minus also source their caffeine from tea leaves, while others such as Northern Wonder use synthetically sourced caffeine.
While a long-term aim for groups in beanless coffee is to work with larger companies and bring their products to the mass market, it could take a while before leading coffee players will adopt their alternatives into their portfolio.
Speaking to Just Drinks earlier this month, Jim Watson, executive director of beverages research at Rabobank, added the industry’s acceptance of bean-free coffee is likely to be a challenge, given the commodity’s ties to labour and terroir. “Coffee, like wine, has an origin story, what country it’s from… what type of coffee bean and how it was processed. But just knowing that the origin is a huge part of what makes coffee coffee,” he said.
He added that players in the beanless space may see the most success in their early days with the on and off-trade. “Some of the big gatekeepers in the industry will be buyers for big retail chains, or a big cafe group… if, in order to meet their own sustainability goals, a big grocery store chain decides that this has a much better offering than coffee, then that’s a big deal, so I think a lot of the battle may play out on that front.”
