Hey, folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now I am supremely honored to be sitting down with Matt Bachmann, who is the co-founder and CEO of Wandering Bear. Matt, great to see you. Great to be here. Yeah, we sat down a couple months ago at our Taste Radio NYC meetup, and I was so thrilled by the conversation, I'm like, "We gotta do a longer format version of this," and here we are in New York City, where we've just wrapped up BevNET Live NYC twenty twenty-six, and I thought I would be exhausted, but I'm feeling good.
You know why? I think it's just the beverage industry is making me feel good. I get a lot of optimism. That's great to hear. Yeah. You've been at this for a while. What was the year that you guys launched? 2014, so it's been 12 years. Twelve years. Lot of brands have come and gone in that time.
A lot of coffee brands have come and gone in that time, and you must have seen your share of peers and competitors come to market, leave the market, scale, recede, do all these different things, and Wandering Bear has evolved quite a bit as a coffee company itself, but you're still here, and I think longevity means a lot in our game.
Twelve years is no joke. It's tough to make it one year. How have you made it so long? At the core, it's been about staying true to who we are as a brand. We've always aimed to take inspiration from what we're seeing happen in coffee shops and bring that to consumers at home and at the office.
Over the years, how we've done that has changed, but staying core to what we've always believed the consumer wants or a segment of the consumer wants, which is a coffee shop in their fridge, has allowed us to make decisions that over time have kept us in the current, moving with the category and growing with it.
The relevance factor is really important. You wanna stay relevant to consumers, your core base, and then those beyond. And I think the idea of a coffee shop in your fridge is brilliant because you know who your customer is. Obviously, it's a premium customer. Someone who goes to a coffee shop is expecting to pay a premium for their coffee, and having that in your fridge is just a more convenient way of doing that.
But going back to who your core audience is and how you identified them, at the time of launch, cold brew was just getting some legs and getting into the mainstream. How did you realize or identify that cold brew could be an opportunity to find some white space in a category where RTD beverages and coffee, there was one brand and one brand only, and that was Starbucks?
Where did you see that opportunity to take cold brew from where it was, which was nowhere, to becoming a mainstream or at least part of the mainstream coffee set? Many of us saw this at the time. It was a first sip type of thing. If people can go back to whenever it was, 2012, '13, '14, when you first had your first great cold brew versus any of the iced coffee you'd ever drank before, you knew it was better.
And so just trusting that premium iced coffee, just based on taste and quality alone, was going to capture demand and drive growth in the category, to us felt very intuitive, and that has proven to be correct. If you look at two of the biggest growth drivers in coffee, the emergence of cold and the preference for cold drinks and cold coffee, as well as the emergence of premium and specialty coffee over these years, those are two very powerful trends that we have been fortunate to help drive and be a part of since the very beginning.
Your tribe, though, the Wandering Bear tribe, the cold brew tribe, I guess in the aggregate, helped propel you to get beyond that year one and year two mark when it is real touch and go for beverage companies. What made your brand different? What made it exciting? What made it attractive to those early customers of yours?
Yeah, we started small We started the business with a $7,000 pitch check we won at Columbia, bought some equipment, set up a nights and weekends operation making premium cold brew in the style that we had been making it at home, and boxing it. We had brought the cold brew box with tap to market. You did all this on seven grand?
We did all this on l- Inflation ... low-- And maybe inflation, maybe low barriers to entry. Sure. Maybe that speaks to some of what we've seen in terms of the number of, you referenced the number of brands that have come in and out- Yeah ... of this category over time, but that's, that was our story. That's what we did, and we saw an opportunity to bring that cold brew from coffee shops into offices.
And so our early adopters initially were offices in New York City that expanded to a national office coffee business that right up until the pandemic was humming and then went to zero. The first real transition of the brand to really addressing the consumer audience was the pandemic, where we began in 2020 the work to build wanderingbear.com as a direct-to-consumer engine, and that's really where it clicked for us that what the consumer is looking for at home was not that different than the promise we were bringing to offices of a coffee shop in the fridge.
But what it did do was expand our thinking about formats and function, and how those two things needed to play into product innovation and growth to help expand both distribution and the number of occasions for consumers that we could serve. I'm glad you brought up format, because I recall Wandering Bear as being a multi-serve, large format brand when it first launched, and you were one of the only ones.
And we're talking about, at the time, the only multi-serve format was that bag and box that you... It wasn't even a bag. It was just a box that you would get from a Dunkin' Donuts or a Starbucks when, for catering. The idea of having a product like that in your fridge was new and interesting to a lot of folks.
But again, it's for a very specific set of consumers who not only know what they're getting, but appreciate what they're getting in that format. Why did you think that was a scalable concept, that bag and box was something that you could sell to a broad range of consumers? It solved a real problem, which was freshness.
Eliminating air and light exposure keeps the coffee fresh for longer, and so with large format, with multi-serve, that was a critical component. It also had the convenience function of having the tap and, without equipment, being able to put coffee in a tap-like experience in any fridge. As we expanded and needed to serve and wanted to serve more consumers, though that size, to your point, doesn't work for everyone, doesn't work for every retailer shelf, doesn't work for every refrigerator shelf.
And so working and figuring out how to stay true to, the promise of freshness and coffee shop quality while expanding formats became part of the game. And to your point, again, we were very focused on serving the home and the office occasion, and so multi-serve really was where we built our brand.
That category, since 2020, has been a major growth driver for RTD coffee overall. And so again, back to authenticity and where we've earned the right and built the capability to play over the years. Some of those early decisions, focus in multi-serve, focus in some of the less competitive segments of the market like office, have actually enabled us with authenticity and with relationships and with kind of a right to play scale in some of the faster-growing parts of the category.
A couple years into the development of Wandering Bear, I recall us as an organization, BevNet maybe specific members of the team asking you guys when are you coming out with a single-serve? When are you coming out with a single-serve?" And eventually you did come out with a single-serve, and it was beautiful.
That Tetra Pak with the bear logo on front. I don't even think you had the words Wandering Bear on the front of the pack. It was just this beautiful-looking package Then I wondered, because it was on the market, and then it was off the market relatively quickly, whether you regret doing that, and I imagine that you do.
Did you feel like that might have been a stumble as a distraction for what you were doing? I don't think it hits the level of regret. It was a very quick decision to discontinue that line because of the focus we had to have during the pandemic to survive, the loss of 80% of our business with office closures.
And so that was a beginning of an entry to a grocery market, to the retail consumer. It was at an early stage in the brand, and very quickly when we looked at where our focus needed to go to, again, live by the things that have served us well, which is staying true to who we are and focusing on the core consumer and that coffee shop at home occasion, there just wasn't room to continue focusing on that and that expansion while also doing what was needed to transition what was an office-based coffee business to a direct-to-consumer online coffee business.
I imagine it really helped inform you about getting into RTDs in different formats and different flavors, which I'm looking at your cold brew latte right now. This is your vanilla latte, which looks beautiful. It's in a slim eight-ounce can. It's got 11 grams of protein per can, and it's made with, quote, "super premium coffee."
And I think the quality of your coffee, you've referenced it a number of times, but the functional value of your coffee was also a reason why people really loved Wandering Bear. You had a strong coffee. Always have. And cold brew in general, people associate it with a strong, high-caffeinated coffee. How much of that was part of your messaging or at least the love that people had for Wandering Bear?
We never sought out to make the highest caffeine coffee possible, but when you only have two ingredients, coffee and water, getting more flavor means using more coffee. Using more coffee means more caffeine, and that's just what happened. That's a big part of what makes our products taste the way they do.
It's the amount of coffee we use and the quality of coffee that we use. When we went to create the ready-to-drink line, the high protein coffee lattes, we had two things we were balancing. We had to stay true to the premium coffee and coffee shop inspired texture, flavor, sweetness level of a coffee shop latte.
But when we looked at the RTD coffee category, the truth was personally, as a team, these were not drinks we were drinking, and it was primarily because of the relationship between sugar and protein in the drinks, right? They were too high in sugar and didn't have necessarily enough other macronutrients to make up for that sugar load, so we really focused on creating a premium latte formulation that we would drink every day that met our, let's just call it like center line standards of nutritional value, and so formulated the lattes with five grams of sugar, 11 grams of protein, only 100 calories, but really focused on underlying coffee quality, coffee impact, and overall taste and texture, aiming to replicate the coffee shop in a can.
And these products came out last September of 2025. Seems like they're doing well at the National and Whole Foods for nine, 10 months, something like that? Yeah, so Whole Foods was a wonderful launch partner, really got behind our vision for the category, which again, wasn't about protein maxing, but it was about bringing modern nutritional common sense into the RTD coffee category, and there's been a ton of interest, and it's really, it's been a big growth driver for us this year.
Products will be rolling out nationally with Target in August, which we're excited about, also taking our new black coffee can. So to the point of launching the RTD co-- the original product- Yep ... the very first thing we ever made this summer will be available in the same eight-ounce can format, which we're very excited about.
That is exciting. It's black coffee in a can, but tastes freaking phenomenal. I can't wait for you to try some. What it tells me is that a lot of innovation is about timing, and it's gotta be right for the company, it's gotta be right for the consumer, it's gotta be right for the retailer, and I am curious about the lattes in particular as being in the right format, that being can, launching at the right time with the right retailer.
How much of that perspective goes into your new product development strategy? Our new product development strategy tries to balance and be ready to balance exactly that. Timing for all of the parties company included, isn't something you always control, but what you can control is your readiness with innovation.
And so our innovation sandbox, our roadmap, is many years long at this point and really focused on all of the different things, flavor, format, variety, that we can do to fulfill our mission of bringing coffee shop quality to consumers at home and at work in ways that taste great and are good for you. And so with that mandate, we are now always working.
This is the pr- the latte in front of you is the product of two years of innovation work that was then ready to launch at the right time. And so our goal is to be ready when we, when the market, when the retailers are ready to launch new innovation, but also to your point, and maybe some of what, Implicit referenced earlier, like launching things too soon or at the wrong time for the businesses can be really negative.
And so being ready and then balanced and ready to go, I think is two different objectives, but serve the same goal of continuing to grow the brand and expand usage occasions. Going to Whole Foods, they must have been really bullish and excited about the opportunity for your lattes in their stores.
Do you feel like you could have launched it without that kind of partner, though? It's just a balance of risk. The level of conviction you have and that is being played back to you by the market, the willingness of a retailer to really get behind a launch, these are things that lower the risk. And that is one of the biggest factors I think you have to manage when undertaking any new venture, 'cause you also have to have the bandwidth as a team to support it with marketing, with focus.
It all consumes time and energy, and so they are thoughtful decisions. And yeah, so having a retail partner like Whole Foods behind it, of course, that is one great chip on the side of do it Prior experience in retailers and prior success in retailers can help guide you through that process. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys did a bunch of business at Costco for some time, and it is interesting that the- Still part of the business.
Yeah. Yeah. The relationship between Costco and Whole Foods is closer than people think is because essentially you're buying the same products at Whole Foods or a lot of the same products just in larger formats or larger pack sizes at Costco. What did that experience or how has that experience taught you about getting into places like Target, for example, and what you wanna do right, how you talk to those retail buyers, how you merchandise and market?
Clearly, again, different channels, but a lot of the same consumers, a lot of the same folks shopping at those places. It's all about creating opportunities to drive trial with the consumer, to gain exposure for the brand that'll give an opportunity for them to put your liquid in the cup for the first time.
Costco is excellent for many reasons. Whether it's the demo opportunities or just the sheer scale of the opportunities with Costco, it's a great visibility and trial driver that we've absolutely seen benefit other retail accounts 'cause to your point, they're getting exposed to the brand and products they can find elsewhere.
It all works together, and I think your earlier point around time and market does so many things because that trial compounds over time. And then as you expand distribution, places that the consumer finds you as you innovate to drive new formats, flavors, products that create new reasons for a consumer who's had a positive experience with the brand- to find and try, those things create our virtuous cycle over time. It's so crazy to me when people talk about the demoing opportunities at Costco 'cause everyone knows you go to Costco and you can go have lunch just based on samples. It's insane. Yeah. But for early-stage brands or just emerging brands, challenger brands you can call them, to do so in Costco seems expensive.
It seems like it might be time-consuming, but it seems like it might be worth it. So for early-stage brands and founders that are listening right now, how do you do it effectively? How do you do it in a way that's actually going to benefit your company in the short term and long? Every case has to be so individual this, is only from our experience and really shouldn't be taken as advice.
But- you did road shows first, right? This goes into the philosophy with how we built Costco shares. Okay. So which is bite off what you can chew, what you know you can deliver on successfully, and no more, so that you can build a case study of success year after year that grows year after year. A big challenge with Costco, they're one of the most honest and transparent retailers you can work with, and that expectation goes the other way too.
So if you commit to something, price, volume, timing, you have to hit those dates, and the velocity hurdles that they expect you to meet are no joke either. And so launching before the brand is ready to deliver on anything, including performance on the floor, which does require both a mix of marketing investment in the clubs to drive trial, but then also a degree of brand awareness so that members walking the floor can find you on that treasure hunt find.
Until a brand is ready to deliver on all those metrics, Costco, I think, can become actually a very expensive detour that could serve as a bit of a watch-out for, 'cause the numbers are very big. But you did it, and you've been doing it, and I think the demo opportunity is so critical to the success of an emerging brand.
How do you demo well? How do you demo in a way that is gonna communicate differentiation, that's gonna communicate, "This is a product that you haven't tasted before that has to be in your fridge"? Totally. Passion and preparation. One of the things we and other... every brand that BevNet has in their corner is the passion and the story behind the brand, and figuring out how to prepare whoever is gonna be on the floor in front of members to convey as much of that founder and brand-led passion as possible with concise talking points, scripted sample recommendations for how the product should be displayed, appropriate training.
Often, Costco will allow you to go in and have brand ambassador reps standing side by side with the paid reps within Costco. Any of those things that a brand can afford to do, have the time to do, to make sure that interaction with the Costco member conveys as much of that authenticity, passion as possible is probably one of the bigger investments in the brand's control with respect to demoing at Costco.
Did you do all this internally? Were you outsourcing demo teams? Primarily internally, but then, yeah, there are some great partners we've worked with that can help you staff up brand ambassadors and support teams for Costco. And if anyone listening wants more specifics, I'm happy to talk offline. Okay.
Matt Bachman. Just find him on LinkedIn. All this costs money, and getting investment after the company went through its struggles- Because of the pandemic, it took some, I'm sure, convincing of investors that there really was a path forward. You can talk about going from a lot of revenue to going to a place where I'm sure you didn't know if the brand would make it or not, and then going to a place where you're raising five million dollars, two years after 2020.
That must have been some kind of rollercoaster. Again, knowing throughout the process that you're going to need to raise money, how did you go from a place where the brand was really struggling because of the pandemic to a place where we've gotta figure something out and right the ship to a place where you are able to go and talk to investors and raise five million dollars as you did in 2022?
It all hinged on us actually righting the ship. So the business went to near zero when the office crashed, but we were able to, over the course of six months, effectively launch and begin scaling wanderingbear.com with great metrics and a very healthy subscription business that still drives a large part of our business today.
Can I pause right there? Please. 'Cause, 'cause I definitely wanna talk about righting the ship and- Yeah ... but there must have been some harrowing times. And look, every single founder I've ever spoken with says, they will go through these periods where they just don't sleep. And when your business goes to nearly zero, you got two options: either you figure out a way to make it work, or you say, "Okay, this is over, and I gotta go get some sort of corporate job or whatever."
Does it ever come into your mind where you're like, "We might have to close this down"? Years before that, it must have been 2016 or 2017 We were in the process of transitioning from self-manufacturing to co-packing, doing a bit of a hybrid at the time, and we lost 100% of our manufacturing on 24 hours notice.
Essentially kicked out the facility we were working. No ability to make product, no inventory in the warehouse worth anything. I remember walking up a street in New York. I was talking to my mom, and she's "You know you don't have to do this, right? You know you can stop." While I knew that intuitively, stopping never felt like the right answer.
And I think as a founder, something within a lot of us, some of those clearest moments are when your back's against the wall and there are no good options, and the best next step requires providing clarity to the people around you about what you're gonna do, how you're gonna get out of it, being honest that the situation is bad, but we have a plan.
Yeah. And in that moment of the pandemic, if you remember, people were talking about, "Oh, three weeks we'll be back in office. Three months we'll be back in office," right? So what we felt was the prudent thing to do at the time was not make any rash decisions. We called our investors, our capital partners, said, "Listen, bridge us this little bit.
Let us just see this through." Remember we applied for PPP at the time. We did everything we could to keep the band together as long as possible. When it became very apparent that the pandemic was gonna go on far longer than three months, then we really shifted strategy. I remember it was June of 2020.
It was an all-team meeting. It was like, "Guys, we are a vertically native digital brand now. We are going to become a direct-to-consumer business. Look at the data from our Amazon store. It is thriving," right? We had sent all of our office inventory into Amazon, and that business 10X'd overnight, and we were like, "Wow, I think it's time to question everything we've ever thought about selling beverages to consumers online."
And we rebuilt our skills. We rebuilt our team. We rebuilt our strategy all around driving awareness and trial that would serve Consumers at home with coffee shop style cold brew. So the spark was the realization that you could actually sell products online, and that people would buy not just some product, but a lot of product, and that gave you the confidence to continue upon that business strategy.
Absolutely right. When did you realize that not only was that strategy working, but that you could potentially go and talk to investors and say, "Okay we've got the brand here at this level. Now we have even more of an opportunity to take it even further"? You raise money often when you need it. We were looking at that time in 2021, 2022, were tons of investment opportunities that seemed like really good ones, that proved to be really good ones.
Two of them was, one, continuing to build and scale our direct-to-consumer business, which required marketing capital to create the awareness that was driving people to the website, and then also expansion capital, because we were having, at that time, retailers coming to us, right? The larger boxes that served offices wouldn't fit on the shelf.
We knew from our consumers that we'd been getting comments for, months, years at that point, that a smaller fridge pack was also something they were interested in, and so we brought the 32-ounce line to grocery and helped create the premium sub-segment of the category on shelf. Correct me if I'm wrong, is most of your business at this point retail and a declining part of it e-commerce, or is e-commerce still a pretty strong part of your business?
So all channels are growing. As a share, direct-to-consumer is declining. This year, 60% of our business will be wholesale, 40% will be direct-to-consumer. At its peak in 2022, direct-to-consumer was 90 to 95% of the business. But the future of the brand is in wholesale. Correct. Yeah. And to do wholesale effectively, you've gotta stay on top of what the consumer wants and how they want it to appear in retail stores and, again, hopefully in their refrigerators.
How do you think about incorporating things like protein, or how do you think about adding a functional component to a new product such that it doesn't feel like it's forced? Our goal was to create a reason to drink in addition to taste. Taste has always been our North Star. Coffee quality is what has driven taste for us to this point.
Flavor variety has driven taste to this point. When we looked at the RTD coffee category, though, outside of taste and indulgence, there wasn't a nutritional reason to drink the products. And so for us, you nailed it The goal wasn't to create a protein drink. Again coming back to our philosophy, what do we have the permission, the capability to do?
What are the consumers telling us they want? The trend of looking at macronutrients, of understanding the composition of what you're putting in your body felt very intuitive, and we saw an opportunity to reformulate the coffee latte in a way that could deliver on taste and coffee shop style and coffee shop indulgence with a reinvented nutritional panel that prioritized protein, downshifted sugar, focused on healthier fats, and the sum of that is what is in the can today.
Did consumers tell you that they wanted protein in these coffees or in the lattes? We've seen for years, actually, in our da- we survey our consumers all the time, the number one diet trend adhered to by our consumers for many years has been high protein. That has reached a fever pitch in the mainstream over the past year, which happened to intersect the launch of these products perfectly or not, depending on your view of it.
I think right now we are in a max protein moment. I think overall, dietary trends are moving towards efficacy. The consumer is smarter and capable of being smarter than they have ever been, and is gonna prioritize dollars towards things that work, and nutritional balance and things like protein, things like fiber, become table stakes in that discussion.
And then I think the question becomes what is the format that's gonna become ritual? And our goal with this was never to reinvent the ritual. It was to offer a healthier alternative that didn't force any sort of compromise on taste. As you continue to scale the business and as you continue to develop as a brand, looking back can help inform you about ways to avoid making mistakes.
And no matter if you're in year one or year 20, you're gonna make mistakes, but how do you minimize those mistakes? How do you look at the road ahead and say, "Let's not do what we did five years ago and screw up here"? Is it possible? You're always gonna run into challenges, but how do you make sure that you don't make the same mistake twice?
The organizational muscle you build is to live in the future as much as the present. What does that mean? As a team, you need to get in the habit of forecasting where you're going to be, what is the range of places you could be at different points in time, three, six, 12, 24 months into the future. And then the more you can divorce that future present self from the decision by trying to set criteria and really think about, "Okay, six months from now, when we are here, when we are facing a decision to launch nationally with Target, how will we make the decision go versus no go?"
Having those conversations early and objectively helps you when you're facing the ultimate decision to have the clarity at the table that gets muddied by the emotion of the moment, by the excitement of the opportunity. In addition to that, you have now a refreshed picture of what the next year looks like because you've built the muscle and you're doing that as an exercise.
I think that's the hardest thing to learn. When you're an early entrepreneur, when you're starting the business, it is energy, and it is reactive, and it is all real time, and that is also a superpower But planning and building a muscle around forecasting and thinking as your future self, as your future organization, bringing more people from the organization into those conversations, bringing them in earlier, those are all things that are part of growing up.
Yeah. You gotta have a solid business and a solid business strategy, and that definitely helps you raise money, and I'm sure it helps you in 2022. But the founder is the reason that a lot of investors will buy into a concept, will buy into a brand, and passion goes a long way. When I first met you and your co-founder, I think you were like a lot of folks that I met.
You were bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, excited about the industry, maybe not really knowing what they were doing, but just saying, "Yeah, we're gonna change the face of coffee. We've got the best cold brew out there," and just generally excited and passionate about everything you're doing. Sometimes when I talk to entrepreneurs who are 10 years in, I feel like they might be a little jaded by CPG.
They're just like, "Okay, yeah, it's just rinse and repeat," and it doesn't seem like they're having fun. It doesn't seem like they have that passion for what they were doing, what they are currently doing. You, I get a different feeling, Matt. I feel like you come into this conversation with a lot of excitement, a lot of love for what you're doing, your passion.
You're very bullish about the opportunity that Wandering Bear has. How do you keep yourself motivated? How do you make sure that you're always staying positive about leading a CPG brand and making sure that every day you wake up, you're happy about leading the company that you're operating? Yeah, it is true.
I do-- I love what I do. I love this industry. I love food and beverage. I love the people I work with. Those things make it easy, easier. But I think from a mindset, and I think this is present across everyone at the company, we run this business like we're gonna be running it for the rest of our lives.
And when that is the case, and when you know that surviving is growing Every year you challenge yourself to think bigger and ask those questions, "Okay what have we earned the right to do now that we didn't have the right to do next year? Where has the category met us? Where's the category moved away from us?
How do we see the field of play?" 'Cause these things are dynamic. You reference other founders being jaded, and I don't know, that hasn't necessarily been my experience. I agree with your point on just founder energy and passion and the power that has in market and with teams. But I do think some of that could come from disappointment or an expectation around duration, how long these things might take.
And, the grass is always greener. I don't think anything is harder or easier. Everything is hard, and I think things being hard is what makes them worth it. Yeah. If things are too easy, they don't have value, and I think we get a lot of value out of the journey. Running a company like you're gonna run it forever goes a long way to proving out the entrepreneurial concept.
If you are the entrepreneur, there's no off-ramp. You're thinking about this as your company. But when you take investment dollars, you gotta think about a potential acquisition. You gotta think about getting those folks their money back at a multiple. How does that factor into your future planning?
I think it serves that objective because the goal is never just to pass the bag. If Wandering Bear does sell one day, whoever buys it needs to continue to grow it. The brand needs to thrive. And so the mentality of running it forever is about creating something durable that can continue to grow, that can survive potential transitions in ownership over the years, and building that structure and that thinking into the core of what the brand is, what the product roadmap is, what the culture of working on the brand means.
These are things we think about a lot. Matt, I always love speaking with you 'cause I feel like I'm getting it straight, and being honest and high integrity is what I'm getting from this conversation, and I really appreciate it. And I think it's good when we can talk pretty candidly about the struggles of beverage entrepreneurship, what it takes to be successful, the holistic nature of the business, and really at its core, delivering on something that consumers want.
Not that you're trying to force upon them, but something that they want and brings value to their lives and to their homes. And I think that's really been the key to Wandering Bear from the get-go. Appreciate that. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I know how busy you are, and so having an opportunity to sit down with you for an hour is really meaningful to me.
So thanks again. No, thank you, Ray. See you soon.
