RIP Cold Brew Set To Compete With Energy Drinks, Marketing To The ‘Fourth-Wave’ Coffee Category

RIP Cold Brew differentiates itself on the RTD coffee shelf

RIP Cold Brew

The active overachiever doesn’t just search for products that help boost momentum. They search for brands that make them feel empowered to reach their goals.

This demographic contains many proud coffee snobs who have limited cold brew options that match their lifestyles. Concentrates from third-wave coffee roasters, despite their new popularity, are packaged in glass and need to be refrigerated; they’re for your home.

Today, RIP Cold Brew introduces itself as a ready-to-drink option for the on-the-go lifestyle, making a 180 from other cold brews and taking all the traditional rules by its limbs–tossing them in the grave. It’s a rebellious business strategy, aligning with the ambitions of its target demo themselves.

RIP is not the brand that will have a line of coffee with different milk options and flavors like caramel and hazelnut. It’s the brand that sets itself apart by offering a variety of caffeine levels and embracing the ‘fourth wave’ of coffee, heavily focusing on that lifestyle component.

It’s all in the DNA of the name itself too, because RIP doesn’t mean you’re dead, but the complete opposite: ‘Reap Infinite Potential.’

Lifestyle Cold Brew

While RIP Cold Brew cofounders Ashmer Aslam and Andrew Sawyer bring their business experience to the table, fellow cofounder Brendan Flannery specifically contributes his knowledge of the coffee industry. Previously at Peet’s Coffee, more of the second-wave identity, Flannery helped launch its K-cups as well as a coconut cold brew in its brick-and-mortar stores. “Working with the Peet’s R&D department, you’re working with quite literally some of the foremost experts on coffee in the entire world,” Flannery tells me.

The cold brew shelf is slowly becoming quite saturated, a large segment taken up by premium roasters like Stumptown, Blue Bottle and Groundwork. “The good stuff tends to come from the brand-name third-wave roasters,” Aslam says. “A lot of those sell the product in glass, which is problematic if you want to throw it in your backpack…The options aren’t always great if you want something more portable.” This is where the RIP team seized on the opportunity to reimagine ready-to-drink coffee.

They saw a market for people with active lifestyles, maybe mountain biking, skateboarding or playing other sports–largely aligned with the likes of Patagonia or YETI–especially in the regions they hail from: Boulder, Colorado and the San Francisco Bay Area. RIP’s target market is for those who live this type of lifestyle, not those who are looking for a certain caliber of coffee.

RIP barely even considers barista-adjacent coffee beverages its competition. “We are not a coffee roaster,” Flannery says. “One of our goals is to position ourselves not just against the existing coffee category, but also against other caffeinated beverages,” largely referring to energy drinks.

“There’s a segment of the population that’s going to graduate from the energy drink space because they don’t want all the sugar and all those extra things, but they still want the caffeine,” Aslam says. “But the cold brew brands that are well distributed on the market don’t really play into that market persona.”

Plus, cold brew concentrates are not ready-to-drink, they require dilution. RIP is simply cold brew coffee that’s pre-diluted with water, ready to drink the moment you crack the can open. “There are enough lattes on the market…enough sugary beverages out there too,” Flannery says. RIP is also shelf-stable, another signal that you can take it anywhere.

RIP is an on-the-go beverage that has on-the-go people in mind. “It’s on-the-go by nature,” he adds.

Killer Branding

RIP’s market differentiator is highlighted by its approach to branding.

“Baseline, the coffee must be good,” Aslam says. “Then, how do we actually bring something to market that looks and feels different from your traditional high-end coffee product?”

Max Hofert, the Boulder-based branding expert behind Max Hofert Design and Powerbomb, helmed RIP’s branding strategy. “[RIP’s] whole thing is pairing it with extreme sports activities, so we amplified that experience…because coffee feels like it’s giving you life and energy,” Hofert tells me.

From hot pink to neon green, the rainbow of highlighter colors that makes up the line of RIP’s current and future varieties are unusual in the coffee set. “If you look at the cold brew category in general, you’ll see a lot of white and coffee cues, creams and browns–if you back up, everything almost blends in,” Hofert says. “[RIP’s] brand in general was built to grab attention.”

But it’s deeper than simply standing out on a shelf. The neon also represents 80’s skate and surf culture. “I didn’t even think about building this as a coffee brand. I thought about building it as a lifestyle brand…the product alone is not enough anymore,” Hofert explains. “When you buy a Harley Davidson, you’re buying the tribe.” That’s the fourth wave–the experience.

And while, in this case, RIP doesn’t stand for ‘rest in peace,’ the brand didn’t shy away from juxtaposing life and death. It’s somewhat of a ‘sleep when you’re dead,’ feeling, with the phrase ‘RIP’ as the vessel for explaining what it means to live an exhilarating life–Reap Infinite Potential. “You immediately see a Reaper on the front [of the can]. It looks and feels different right out of the gate,” Hofert says. “One of the taglines is ‘Wake the Dead.’”

As part of Hofert’s Powerbomb framework, he and the RIP team brainstormed how to translate that feeling to build community by signaling its use-occasion. “If you look at RIP’s photography style, there’s a lot of motion blur in it…because part of the whole concept here is portability.”

RIP plans to translate this unique branding approach to marketing to its audience at music festivals, extreme sporting events and even local cycling clubs. “It’s about having a little bit more of an aggressive brand in the market,” Aslam says. “One that draws in the younger consumer profile who would have gravitated towards a Monster [energy drink].”

Infinite Potential

Most RTD coffee beverages differentiate themselves as lattes based on milk types and flavored syrups. “We want to innovate in a different way,” Flannery says.

Over time, RIP will start rolling out different varieties with different caffeine levels, signalling the energy drink market as its main competitor. Lower caffeine levels could compete at the other end of the spectrum with beverages like tea. “There’s a ton of other junk that’s in [energy drinks] compared to something that’s just coffee and water,” Flannery says. The first RIP Cold Brew to hit shelves is a turquoise 12oz can with about 260mg of caffeine, compared with a cold brew of the same size which typically has about 200mg.

If RIP is marketing itself to those with an active lifestyle, making the product shelf-stable was crucial. As the product develops over time, RIP will likely incorporate some type of shelf-stable milk options to future SKUs. But as they initially rip into the market, they know they need to make a statement about who the brand is. “If we’re really trying to capture the market that we think is there, you might not want to fill up on a heavy dairy latte before you’re going to mountain bike,” Flannery says. “Brands want to play it safe…we know the caramel macchiato type of thing works. That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to have some really interesting, more refreshing flavor experimentation.”

While the base of the Guatemalan-sourced medium-to-light roast has notes of dark chocolate, RIP plans to introduce flavors to some extent, too–but in a non-traditional way. RIP sees opportunity in flavor-infused beans. But the RIP guys have their minds in a completely different universe. “Coffee is due for the same type of flavor innovation that you see in different adjacent categories like sparkling water…there’s no reason why you couldn’t do a blackberry lemonade with coffee,” Flannery says. “There’s so much that you can do with coconut…citrus flavors work really well with cold brew.”

He adds, “We’re really not doing service to the brand if we’re not pushing the envelope.”