Clear coffee is as transparent as water. And this is so interesting!

How to innovate coffee, which is one of the most appreciated beverages in the world? Clear Coffee is the world’s first transparent coffee available in the market. Why creating something like that? Learn here at Eat Innovation!

Clr Cff (Clear Coffee) is the first transparent coffee in the market. What’s it made of? Arabica coffee beans and pure water, without preservatives nor sugar.

The innovation lies in the method, which is patented and kept secret by the startup of the same name. The inventor ensures that the entire beverage discoloration process is based only on physical treatments and does not use chemicals to achieve transparency. There is a loss of caffeine in the process which is then added at the end until the dosage promised in the packaging, which is the same as the traditional coffee.

Okay, you must be wondering: why would anyone drink a clear coffee instead of a traditional black? Simple, there are those who want to avoid staining their teeth, but without giving up the pleasure of drinking a coffee and still keep the smile white. Imagine also the disaster of dropping black coffee on clothing the day of that important meeting at work. With Clr Cff you just wait for the clothes to dry and the stain goes unnoticed.

David Nagy, 26-year-old, resigned from his job in 2013 and spent months developing the product and joined his brother to open the company. The unmet need that awakened him was his own, who drinks around 5 coffees a day and so he always had to use whitening products on his teeth.

Although he had no product development experience, he was able to finish the prototype in 2015. It is only now on sale in England and on their website (here). The first phase of sales happened in a crowdfunding campaign that raised 3000 euros.

The price of the product, however, did not go anywhere near what David estimated. He said in an interview that it would cost something between 2 and 2.50 euros, but the final price is almost 6 euros. The trajectory of the entrepreneurial brothers is very interesting from the point of view of innovation management, since it is not common for a startup product to take 5 years between idea and sales.

They called attention due to their persistence, they tried crowdfunding, and reached only 1 percent of the £ 35,000 target, but they moved on. In addition to the wrong price estimative, they were also too optimistic about the time it would take them to move to sales, which is also common among newbie entrepreneurs. In fact, it is common in humans, there is even a scientific term for it, it is the “optimism bias“. But they finally managed to put the product on the market.

It is worth remembering that this is not the first transparent coffee that is known, in 2014 coffee maker Caribou Coffee launched the Caribou Clear, but everything was just an April’s Fool joke and their product never really existed. Clr Cff really exists!

Caribou clear coffee – It was all an April’s Fool joke.

So, what do you think about clear coffee?

References: Sophie’s Blend, Grub Street, Collective Hub