Voyage Foods press photo
Bay Area startup Voyage Foods has launched sales of a chickpea and rice hull drink that it calls “bean-free coffee” to wholesale customers in foodservice and food manufacturing channels.
In an announcement today, the Oakland-based, venture-capital-backed company centered its business-to-business pitch on “price stability,” referencing price volatility in the coffee industry, including today’s relatively high commodity prices.
“Today, Voyage’s bean-free coffee with caffeine is over 40% cheaper than traditional coffee, providing coffee manufacturers with price stability that result in significantly better margins,” the company said.
Considering this pitch, it’s also worth noting that the coffee industry is less than a decade removed from one of the longest and most severe green coffee price slumps in the free market era.
Voyage Foods is one of a small handful of emergent, well-funded brands offering a “coffee-free” alternative that is designed to replicate the caffeine content, flavors and experiences of coffee using alternative natural ingredients. A notable competitor in this “coffee-free” space is Seattle-based Atomo, which recently scored a deal with New York-based coffee chain Bluestone Lane.
The Voyage Foods logo.
Voyage, which scored a $36 million Series A investment in 2022 offers the “coffee” product alongside two different nut-free spreads, one designed to act like peanut spread and the other like hazelnut spread, as well as a cocoa-free “chocolate” product.
In today’s announcement of the foodservice and food manufacturing channel launch, Voyage said it was intentionally not targeting the specialty coffee market.
“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, CEO and founder of Voyage Foods, said. “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.”
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