Sure, there's pumpkin spice this, pumpkin spice that-- but what about baklava or gulab jamun lattes? One innovative brand, Transcendence Coffee, is bringing global flavors to the coffee aisle. Featured in esteemed publications like Eater and Food & Wine, Transcendence has quickly become an innovation leader, pushing the envelope in a category that has touted some of the same flavors for decades.
We sat down with Mitalee, the Founder, to learn a bit more about how the brand came to be:
- From engineer to coffee founder – how has your background informed your approach to starting a CPG brand?
My prior experience as an engineer at Apple, where I spent time on stress testing and hardware quality, really guided my ability to build high quality consumer products end-to-end. Engineering is highly technical and detail oriented, so it was instrumental in teaching me to problem solve quickly and with confidence when building Transcendence Coffee. Within 6 months of having the initial idea, we were able to get a product into market and iteratively test, improve, and scale!
- What is important for you to focus on when it comes to growth?
As Transcendence continues to grow as a challenger brand against big syrup companies like Monin and Torani, the most valuable pillars of growth are field sales marketing, wholesale distribution channels, and social media content marketing. Since 80% of our brand will be B2B food service for cafes and coffee shops, growth comes from the continued differentiation of our educational, recipe, and community-based content as well as increasing our coffee shop accounts.
- What are your goals in the next year and what should people look out for?
We're excited about a few really big cafe partnerships and influencer drink collaborations in NYC and LA (that we'll be revealing on our social channels when they drop in 2024!!)
- It’s been over a year since the start of Transcendence coffee. If you could go back, what would you tell yourself when you were first starting out?
Our two biggest learnings are the importance of in-house social media marketing and the required capital to start Transcendence. Despite running a company that's largely B2B and not D2C, organic social media marketing is a vital channel to growing our accounts, building brand affinity, and validating consumer demand for securing larger partnerships. We bootstrapped Transcendence Coffee with our personal savings, and have since learned how capital intensive it is to scale a CPG company quickly and raised a pre seed round to fuel growth. Most importantly, "overnight" successes are truly many years in the making so you just have to keep building your business on your own terms!
- And last, but not least, how do you take your coffee?
I love an iced oat latte with 1 pump of syrup for a little flavor!!
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