Some games are simply just harder than others. And then, there’s playing the hard games on hard mode. That’s what this story is about. Consumer-packaged-goods is a hard game. Trying to ‘change behaviour’ or ‘educate the market’ is playing the game on hard mode. But the harder the game, the bigger the prize.

Today, we’re doing a deep dive on Cometeer, a brand disrupting the coffee market with new technology, form factors and ideas. They’re playing a tough game and there are lessons in it for everyone. Grab a coffee & buckle up.

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Pay attention to what the freaks do on the weekend.

The future belongs to those already doing things differently. That’s how Cometeer began - with a frustrated founder chasing café-quality coffee at home. Matt Roberts spent years freezing brews in ice-cube trays before debuting the brand at the 2019 Specialty Coffee Expo.

OK so let me explain the concept to you (and you will see their challenge). It looks like a standard machine-capsule-pod thing. But it ain’t.

Nor is it a cold brew. Or instant coffee. Or ready-to-drink.

It’s flash-frozen, precision-brewed speciality coffee. Delivered in a frozen 10x concentrate capsule that you melt to drink - hot or iced. Got it?

It is unlike anything on the market: they brew coffee at peak extraction, then cryogenically freeze it using liquid nitrogen into a puck. That puck, once melted in water, becomes a cafe-level cup. No machine. No beans. No barista.

That complexity is what made Cometeer such a perfect direct-to-consumer product when it launched. But it’s also what makes the brand’s shift into retail so fascinating - and so difficult.

The $100 million problem

They launched with a tight DTC model: subscription-only, shipped frozen in dry ice, featuring capsules from a rotating lineup of premium roasters like Counter Culture and Onyx.

Early adopters loved it. TIME Magazine named it one of the best inventions of 2022. Reviewers raved. Sales grew. But they had raised over $100 million in funding, and that level of investment needs intense scale to eventually pay off.

Scale that DTC alone cannot deliver.

Remember, you have to fish where the fish are.

Coffee-at-home is mostly sold in physical retail locations. So in 2022, Cometeer made the leap from highly controlled, highly educational online sales to the messy, brutal arena of grocery retail.

They began in Erewhon - luxury grocery with a different kind of shopper mindset. People linger, explore, read labels - all things that are quite unusual in a ‘normal’ supermarket. Sampling was key. Early signs showed market acceptance.

Putting that VC money to work

From there came Sprouts Farmers Market. But this time, Cometeer did something unusual. They didn’t sit in the frozen aisle. They brought a freezer to the coffee aisle. Literally. Custom-branded, glass-door freezers were installed next to bagged beans and instant coffee. The message was subtle but clever: “This is coffee - just better.” Not a dessert, not a frozen novelty. This is your morning brew, made differently.

That placement mattered. Shoppers weren’t going to discover frozen coffee next to frozen peas. By owning space in the coffee aisle, Cometeer positioned itself where the shopper was already making their decision. It turned an unknown product into a new choice within a known category.

Of course, being in the right place is only half the battle. 

In retail, the packaging is the pitch. And Cometeer’s original DTC boxes were never going to work in a freezer full of boxed meals and microwaveable dumplings.

So they redesigned.

The 4-seconds that matter most

If you’re new here, you need to know one thing. We obsess over packaging design. And this is one of those designs you sit up and pay attention to.

Cometeer partnered with NYC creative studio Creech, the team behind the AG1 rebrand and a bunch of other epic consumer-goods branding work.

I think this design is such a dramatic improvement from where they were for one reason: the visuals.

Our brains process images faster than words.
(Partly why this is always an image-heavy newsletter).

In a mass-market retail environment, shoppers need to be able to decipher your concept, proposition and product all within a few seconds. The greatest shortcut is an impactful visual. Capture attention, deliver comprehension, then worry about explaining the details.

So how do you nail the perfect visual?

For a premium brand expanding nationally, it’s best to avoid stock imagery.

And photography is tricky. Even in a studio with all the stylist hacks in the world, it is incredibly difficult to get the right balance of swirl and steam in coffee (we’ve tried before, it sucks).

So Cometeer and Creech teamed up with the epic Haruko Hayakawa, an independent CG artist. Her work is pretty mind blowing - go and check it out.

The use of CG here makes so much sense. Often, visuals can feel like they “ruin” the design - making it look cheap or tacky. But in this case, the visuals elevate the design. It does a great job of both communicating the concept and driving taste appeal.

Only time will tell

As much as we geek out over packaging, it is only one spoke in the wheel of the entire bike. That is to say, packaging is just part of marketing, which needs to exist within a solid business model.

And on that note - there are definitely some questions about whether this idea will find mass-market appeal. Cold-chain logistics is expensive. Retail margins are lean. Educating consumers is an endless battle.

Hard game. Hard mode. 

Cometeer is doing what most brands wouldn’t dare - changing behaviour in the most unforgiving environment there is: the grocery store.

If they pull it off, they won’t just have built a coffee brand. They’ll have built the blueprint for how to make weird stuff win at retail.

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