Solo Coffee: Bringing innovation and cold brew variety to UK coffee consumers
Cold Coffee Success Stories is a series that focuses on pioneering companies in the cold coffee space and their unique journeys. This week, we are featuring Solo Coffee, a UK-based specialty coffee business that’s aiming to make cold brew more accessible in Britain.
The UK is one of the largest coffee-consuming countries in the world. It’s estimated that Britons drink over 95 million cups of coffee per day. This means that by 2028, the UK is expected to spend over £2.17 billion on coffee per year.
Theo Garcia and Alex Foss Sims, co-founders of Solo Coffee, are coffee veterans, having met while cutting their teeth behind the counters of London’s specialty coffee shops before starting their own venture.
We spoke to Theo to gain some more insight into Solo’s journey through specialty coffee and towards cold coffee. He explains the reasoning behind Solo’s attention to cold brew trends and what he expects the future of both his company and the wider UK coffee market to look like.
Starting out – from flat whites to cold brew concentrate
“My co-founder, Alex Foss Sims, and I were walking the world of specialty coffee as baristas for several years,” remembers Theo.
“After learning all of the complexities of how to brew a great cup, we realised that most people were more interested in just drinking a good coffee than the intricacies of learning how to brew one.”
“In the UK, there were really no great options for ready-to-drink coffee. They were all filled with milk and sugar. From there, we made it our mission to make great coffee more accessible and break through the noise of the sometimes overly complicated coffee world.”
Theo touches on some key points regarding the origins and challenges of alternative coffee beverages and cold brew, specifically in the United Kingdom. British coffee drinkers have long held an overwhelming preference for milk-based coffee shop staples – think lattes and cappuccinos or flat whites.
The strong democratisation of coffee quality in the UK, led by the ubiquity of quality branded coffee shop chains like Starbucks and Costa Coffee, has meant consumers can find a great cup on almost every high street.
Moreover, the Brits have traditionally been less RTD-obsessed than their American cousins, meaning that, by and large, a high-street coffee shop has been the place to go for a daily caffeine fix.
Things have changed in the last ten years or so. In 2014, the Guardian newspaper wrote a piece titled ‘Coffee: how cold brew became the next big thing‘. The article describes the impact of the summer season of that year, recording a spike in popularity for the less acidic, sweeter, and cold nature of cold brew.
“From seemingly nowhere, every third-wave coffee bar worth its salted caramel shortbread is on the case, from East London’s Timberyard to Edinburgh’s Brew Lab,” author Tony Naylor writes.
Indeed, since cold brew’s golden summer a decade ago, retail appearances of cold brew have grown enormously, from independent cafés to national supermarkets. Solo Coffee, by readjusting its focus towards the evolving cold coffee and cold brew segments, is very much on the right track.
How Solo Coffee seizes the initiative by capitalising on new trends
A key benefit of cold brew coffee is its ability to be easily made into a specialty coffee beverage. A roaster or brewer simply needs to use speciality-grade ground coffee as the cold brew base and brew as they would normally.
Just like cold brew, specialty coffee is a growing coffee industry category, backed by discerning consumer palates and higher expectations around quality and provenance.
We asked Theo his thoughts on how the two link.
“No doubt, specialty coffee is a growth area for cold brew coffee more generally,” he says.
“It is one of the fastest-growing consumer segments in the wider soft drink market. Driven by younger generations’ preference for convenience and quality, consumers are moving away from hot drinks and embracing year-round cold coffee.”
Among the most powerful food-related consumer trends in the United Kingdom are convenience and quality. With the aforementioned widespread accessibility to higher-quality coffee wherever consumers choose to purchase their beverages, operators and businesses have had to dramatically up their game to compete for consumer attention and loyalty.
The result has been an increasingly competitive marketplace, one in which the battles are fought over coffee quality excellence and highly convenient packaging formats.
Cold brew is an ideal solution for coffee roasters and brands facing this challenge. It is easy to brew at scale, suitable for different packaging types, has a long shelf life, and is highly customisable across flavour, ingredients, additives, and functionality.
Solo Coffee, for example, has chosen to focus on the cold brew concentrate segment, a product that is bought for home consumption and diluted with cold water or dairy or non-dairy milk before consumption. Customisable? Tick. Convenient? Tick. Specialty-grade? Tick.
“The UK is predominantly espresso-based when it comes to coffee out-of-home,” says Theo.
“Cold brew doesn’t have the same fame as it does across the pond. For this reason, we had to create a product that the UK demographic would understand.”
“Surprisingly, a ready-to-go espresso makes more sense to a Brit than a cold brew. Our product needed to create various serving options – espresso martinis, americanos, iced lattes, etc. – rather than just being a base for cold brew coffee.”
Solo offers coffee drinkers a high-quality cold brew concentrate that appeals in numerous ways and helps the customer explore beverage varieties from the comfort of their own homes.
How does Solo Coffee think about packaging?
“Packaging says a lot about a product, which can be both a hindrance and an advantage,” Theo says.
“For us, we find that Tetra-Pak is an efficient way to package cold brew, and it makes our supply chain easy to manage. However, the connotations are hard to avoid. People associate cartons with milk, especially alternative milk, and therefore generally a cheaper product.”
Cold brew concentrate can be packaged in myriad ways. Tetra Pak cartons, for example, enable the multi-serve requirements of concentrate, much like bag-in-box or cold brew pouch packaging solutions.
“We prefer to use packaging that has a lower carbon footprint but also offers a longer shelf-life and cuts down on stock wastage.”
Coffee consumers are increasingly worried about the environmental impact of the products they purchase, and packaging plays a key role in their overall sustainability perceptions.
By opting for packaging that boasts eco-conscious certifications, a coffee company can endear itself further to the customer who is already intrigued by the variation and convenience they are seeking.
Bag-in-box cold brew packaging, for example, is 100% recyclable and compostable. The kraft paper and corrugated cardboard outer box can be easily separated from the biodegradable internal aseptic bag for complete recyclability. Sizes range from 1.5 litres to 20 litres.
Flexible cold brew pouches offer the same benefits. Available in sizes ranging from 187 ml single-serve portions to 3-litre multi-serve solutions, they are made from LDPE and PLA plastics, which are certified recyclable and biodegradable.
“Brand aesthetics are important,” says Theo, “but I think what the packaging is communicating is more important.”
To start packaging your cold brew coffee in certified, sustainable packaging, visit our website or contact the team.
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