Re-Thinking A 1Bn+ Market: White & Private Label In Coffee-Based Drinks

Cold brew is one of the fastest-growing coffee categories today — a $1.5 billion market growing 20% a year, and a drink half of under-25s already call excellent, against just 15% of people over 60. It's also one of the hardest coffees to produce at real industrial volume. The reason goes back further than most people expect.

For centuries, hot water was used to extract aromas from coffee — the Ethiopian Jebena, the Turkish ibrik, the French press, espresso, the moka pot. But heat has a scaling limit: a few minutes at high temperature is perfect for a few millilitres, not for a 10,000-litre batch. Cold brew broke from that lineage on purpose, and inherited the opposite problem: reaching the same strength takes 6 to 24 hours at room temperature, squarely inside what food safety regulators call the danger zone, where common bacteria can survive for up to twelve days.

This talk closes with the method that gets past both problems at once — producing cold brew at real industrial volume, safely and consistently, without trading away quality for scale. It's already behind cold brew launched under brands including Snapchat and Google, covering both routes companies actually use it for: building their own branded product, and private label for distributors and retailers.