Voga Coffee, Maker of Ground Control Brewers, Ceases Operations

Ground Control at the 2023 Specialty Coffee Association Expo. Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.

Voga Coffee LLC, the Oakland, California-based maker of innovative Ground Control batch coffee brewing machines, has ceased operations.

The company, which first launched onto the specialty coffee scene with a working prototype of its first Ground Control brewer in 2016, is no longer directly offering sales or service, and all 18 of its full-time staff members have been laid off, Daily Coffee News confirmed.

The closure comes as Voga/Ground Control struggled to deliver on its all-new model, the Ground Control SM.

In an interview with Daily Coffee News, most recent Voga Coffee CEO Arno Holschuh characterized Ground Control as a close-knit group of deeply passionate employees who were ultimately unable to overcome a series of small business challenges. 

The Ground Control SM brewer. Daily Coffee News photo by Howard Bryman.

“I think one of things that others did not know about Voga is that we were a small company, struggling in ways that would be familiar to many other small companies in the industry,” Holschuh told DCN. “We constantly fielded customer demands for free machines or service, and the argument was generally that they were a small business that was being pushed around by us. But in many cases, we had fewer employees than they did.”

Ground Control Co-Founder Eli Salomon, who was replaced by Holschuh in the CEO role last year, described the cessation of the business as “heartbreaking.”

“I feel terrible for our customers, for our team and for our investors,” Salomon told DCN. “We gave it our all but ultimately it was not enough to save the business.”

The company is currently being wound up through an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (ABC), a California state law alternative to federal bankruptcy that allows financially distressed companies to assign assets to a third party for liquidation, with net proceeds distributed to creditors based on priority.

Many of those individual Voga/Ground Control creditors are people who purchased but never received the SM machine, which Holschuh said was not able to be produced on “anything like the schedule foreseen.”

DCN has communicated with numerous people who have claimed to have not received Ground Control machines based on pre-orders, or who have not received replies to service or parts inquiries within the past month. An email sent to Ground Control in late March identifies a firm called Garathen, Inc., as the assignee of all of Ground Control’s current assets.

The email says that Holschuh is advising the firm, helping to find willing buyers for all of Ground Control’s assets, which include intellectual property, new and used equipment and the entire inventory of spare parts.

A Ground Control Cyclops machine installed in a Dallas coffee shop. Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.

Holschuh said that Ground Control sold 950 of its Cyclops machines, and the company has been trying to satisfy customers’ needs, but there is limited capacity due to having no remaining staff. Said Holschuh, “Our goal is to sell the inventory to a third party that would be willing to operate a parts program.”

Salomon said he hopes the company’s IP can be sold, both to help return money to creditors and to give potential new life to the innovations behind Ground Control.

“I would say that Ground Control as a technology, as an idea, as a way of running a coffee business, is something I feel very honored to be a part of,” Salomon said. “I think what we did was really bold and audacious, and our hope is that the coffee industry sees more of that.”

The winner of multiple Best New Product Awards at Specialty Coffee Association events, Ground Control made a name for itself offering a visually striking and technologically innovative approach to batch brewing. Rather than relying on traditional auto dripping, Ground Control relied on immersion brewing while adding series of pulses and vacuum extractions, resulting in a fundamentally different style of batch brew.

In a product category long dominated by names such as Fetco, Curtis and Bunn, Ground Control offered a novel visual alternative while catering to specific menu trends such as cold brew, batch espresso for iced drinks and lower-volume hot brews.

A Ground Control batch brewing system unveiled in 2016. Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.

Holschuh, who joined Ground Control following executive positions with two other envelope-pushing Bay Area companies, Bellwether Coffee and Blue Bottle Coffee, described the closing of the company and the loss of jobs as a “bad situation” and “terrible.”

“Every small business is in some sense living an endangered life,” he told DCN. “Be kind to one another.”

[Disclosure: Voga/Ground Control has been repeat advertiser on Daily Coffee News for years.]

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