Kaffe Bueno is a pioneering bioscience company upcycling coffee by-products into high-performance, and all-natural ingredients for a wide range of everyday products.
What does it mean for you to be a purposeful brand and work with an ideal at the core of your business?
”First of all, we started Kaffe Bueno because we wanted to make a real change, and not only to talk about it. Our company and brand exist because of that. Why we are doing what we are doing always comes first, and that’s the fundamental difference between us and a company that may need to adapt its brand and business to fit a new purpose. But as a business driven by a mission to make a change, our approach is not very different from any other business. We just try to do things that make sense, and our innovation approach is very market-driven.
We’re digging into real customer problems, and then trying to figure out a way or multiple ways to solve them using science and coffee. Many companies and brands only seem to be thinking ”How can I make my business more profitable?” There is nothing wrong with that, every business should be as profitable as possible, but we believe that profitability and responsibility shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.”
Even though you are a brand mostly talking to other businesses, your brand, your purpose and your story are also relevant for consumers?
”Yes, since there’s already an increased interest among people to make sustainable choices in their everyday lives, we think that it makes sense to make them aware of what we are doing as well. It’s not that we want to become a consumer brand, but we have noticed that many B2B companies lack the thought – at least from a branding and communications perspective – of a consumer going into their website and wanting to know more about the ingredients they use.
So, if you want to move the needle faster, you should be talking to the consumer. Because if more people become aware of your solution, you can use the consumer’s demand to put pressure on the brands making the products to use more sustainable ingredients. That makes sense.”
So, your brand story also must resonate on many different levels?
”From a storytelling perspective, we must raise awareness where it actually matters the most. The more people understand how their products are made, the more critical they get when making their choices. And then they potentially get more interested in knowing about the ingredients and the manufacturers of those ingredients. That’s one layer. The other layer is the understanding and perception that there’s much more to coffee than what you drink – that coffee is an undervalued natural resource that could be a part of many, many everyday products. That story is bigger. It’s universal. Everybody needs to have that understanding in the future.”
How would you describe your brand?
”Our brand has always been young and not super formal, and our voice is human, direct, fact-oriented, and scientific. However, the Kaffe Bueno brand has also evolved and matured. We are still challengers, but today you can also sense that we’re coming from a place of knowledge and experience, rather than pure idealism. The culture that we’ve built in the company is reflected in how we communicate. We are concise, more confident and bold.”
Would you say that your brand has evolved as you have gained more traction around your purpose?
–Yes, and I think that’s a natural thing. Because we started out with a hypothesis and an idea of what we wanted to do. And since then our company has constantly evolved. We’ve grown, we’ve learned, we’re more experienced today. All of that needs to be reflected in our brand.
We went from being a start-up company that had two products in one market, whereas today we are a scale-up company with more than twenty products in the pipeline, targeting four different industries in basically all the territories in the world. The rebranding we did last year together with you at Barbro, very much reflects our journey. We needed to adapt our identity and expression so that we could keep growing while keeping our brand coherent when launching new products and targeting new industries. And our brand and new identity is very much connected to our purpose. It’s inspired by nature, bioscience and coffee. And we’ve kept our youthful, bold, cool type of vibe, but in a bit more serious, professional, and trustworthy way.