Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Rich person outside the coffee industry deciedes it’s time to “disrupt” things, in a manner that can only be described as deeply cringe, with results that feels roughly five years behind the wider curve they are allegedly disrupting.
The latest installment of said phenomenon comes courtesy of Philippe von Borries, co-founder of Refinery29 (remember them?), who is using some of his $400 million ZIRP froth venture funny money payday he earned by selling out to Vice (remember them?) to start a canned coffee line. But this isn’t just any canned coffee line: it’s one that will finally bring design and smart branding to the otherwise moribund coffee CPG space… at least according to von Borries.
The news came out via Feed Me, the wildly popular daily enterprise/culture/this-modern-world-of-ours newsletter by Emily Sundberg. In an exclusive, Sundberg interviewed von Borries about life after Refinery29. And instead of getting back in the world of media, von Borries decided to make the pivot to coffee with a new line of ready-to-drink canned coffee soda called Esspo (not to be confused with Espro).
It’s not a terribly long interview and you can read it all here, but we’ll get to the bad good stuff. When asked why coffee, von Borries states, “We’ve always been brand first people. Even in media. That’s always been a core motivation and a core orientation. The interesting thing about CPG is that while the product has to be amazing, so much of it is in the storytelling and how you get people to be excited about your product. So we saw a big miss in coffee — it’s kind of a brown, stale, forgettable shelf. No fun. No innovation.”
Brown, stale, forgettable.
How does Esspo look to break up the monotony? Take a look for yourself. Here’s their Classic Vanilla.
That is… well there’s some red I guess. But this can is otherwise primarily… quite brown actually? And not in the fun, crunchy, imperfect Ween way.
You’re probably wondering if I cherry picked the brownest can in the Esspo line-up in order to make a point. And you’d be right, I totally did. So in the spirit of fairness, here are Esspo’s other two, boldly disruptive designs.
That’s better. They are less brown. But they’re also quite reminiscent of, well, a lot of other coffee CPG products that are also not remotely brown. If only there was a design compendium of ready-to-drink coffee products over the last four years we could take a look at to compare how disruptive the Esspo can actually is or isn’t, in terms of the broader design trends in the specialty coffee CPG space.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a non-extensive collection of canned coffee drinks we’ve featured as part of our Ready To Drink series.
How about a lovely Coffee Palmer from Coffee Project NY
Or maybe a Coffee Soda from Comeback Beverage Co
Or you can dig deep into the archives for a Manuka Honey Sparkling Cold Brew from New Zealand’s Flight Coffee
Here are some Cascara Botanicals from Needs & Wants, sister brand of Slingshot Coffee
Or how about three or four of these jammers from Three Coffee
Drag queen cold brew? Say less, Juanita More! with Ritual Coffee
Even Tate Galleries has a Coffee Kombucha collab, but what do they know about art?
Someone ring up the geniuses at Pantone (or better yet Moccamaster) so we can figure out which packaging is the brownest.
Even by von Borries’s own admission, Esspo is “brand first.” That brand just so happens to be Millennial cringe. (To be clear, we are very aware that Sprudge is also cringingly Millennial, thanks). But Esspo’s vibe appears to be all about vibesmaxxing the vibes to the max. They say “vibes” a lot on their website, and other things too, like, “Our mission is to energize your everyday moments. We don’t believe in longer days – just better ones. More present. More intentional. More delicious.” This couplet has now been formally nominated for a Sprazzie award for Worst Coffee Marketing Copy, traditionally one of the more hotly contested categories.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. Something about how not introduce yourself into a new industry (the corollary being, don’t talk shit if you don’t know shit). Perhaps it’s about the dangers of putting package over product—and insulting the color scheme you chose to employ—or pretending like you’re being all disruptive and stuff when actually your can looks a lot like many other cans that preceded your can, which means you aren’t being disruptive at all.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
