New York’s Joe Coffee Launches ‘Specialty Instant’ Line

Joe Coffee’s Specialty Instant Coffee. Photo by Johnny Fogg, courtesy of Joe Coffee Company.

In the little more than a year since accepting an investment from restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, New York’s Joe Coffee has opened at least four new coffee shops — including in Bryant Park, the Financial District, the Upper West Side and Brooklyn Heights — to bring its number of retail stores up to 18.

In an attempt to meet consumers through an entirely different angle, the company has also just launched Joe Coffee Specialty Instant Coffee, a product that contains six individual packets containing 5 grams of dehydrated instant coffee solids designed to be combined with 8 to 10 ounces of water for single-cup servings.

The product is made possible through a collaboration with existing instant coffee producer and purveyor Swift Cup Coffee, one of a small handful of players in the emerging “specialty instant” coffee category in recent years, alongside names such as Sudden Coffee and Voilá.

The Swift Cup process involves brewing a coffee concentrate then dehydrating the brew through freeze-drying until only soluble solids remain that can eventually be reconstituted with water. According to the company, it has entered into collaborations for freeze-dried coffee with other prominent names in the specialty coffee universe, including Ultimo Coffee, ReAnimator Coffee Roasters, Tandem Coffee Roasters, Case Coffee Roasters and Neat Coffee, among others.

In addition to the Specialty Instant launch, Joe enters this Spring with two new bottled cold brew-based products — Black and Latte — also to be made available at Joe stores, online and at select retail locations.

“As we were developing these new products, we put taste, sourcing, quality and accessibility at the forefront to stay true to our ideals, and have created a superior-tasting instant coffee that removes user error and is one we are proud to offer in our stores,” Joe Coffee Founder and President Jonathan Rubinstein said in an announcement today. “We are incredibly excited to share this with coffee lovers everywhere.”

(Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that there were five packets of coffee in each box. There are six.)