Let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there. How did your company get started and why?

Whether you roast, brew, or just enjoy a good cup of coffee, everybody has a special relationship with the bean. The problem is, caffeine can exacerbate anxiety. So in a year filled with new stresses, our relationship with coffee got a little complicated. Alvaro and I met in 2019 during our training period as Venture for America fellows, and our mutual interest in mission-driven entrepreneurship made us fast friends. 

At the time, I was working in Detroit, and Alvaro in Birmingham. While catching up over one of those Zoom happy hours, we chatted about how coffee jitters and anxiety was affecting our work and life. So with free time and a common enemy, we brewed our solution: Jibby Coffee. 

We began working on Jibby in early 2020 with an idea and a mantra: People, plants, and planet. In other words, we’re conscious about our impact on our customers and suppliers, our plant-based ingredients, and the world. That’s why we source our CBD from American farms, pay a premium to Colombian farmers for their organic coffee, and pledge 1% of all our sales to provide clean drinking water to communities in need.

What is your product and how would you describe it?

We cold-brew delicious Colombian coffee and balance it with tasteless, pharma-grade CBD. We made Jibby for coffee lovers like us who’ve realized their relationship with coffee is no longer sustainable but are not willing to compromise on flavor or switch over to coffee alternatives like matcha or yerba mate. 

How have you pivoted your business this year?

We had the challenge, and perhaps opportunity, to build our business during COVID. I’d say how we’re different from a traditional beverage company is that we’ve geared our business model around a post-COVID world where we believe eCommerce will be a much more salient sales channel. We’re devoting a great deal of time and resources towards education on CBD and brand awareness in order to build an authentic online experience for our coffee drinkers. I guess this is a natural point to plug jibbycoffee.com!

What is your next challenge to overcome?

Our greatest challenge is to convince consumers why CBD is the missing ingredient in coffee, and to do so we need to rebuild trust around CBD as a functional ingredient. Over the last few years, consumers have seen so many CBD brands entering the market with gimmick-y, snake oil products that oftentimes simply don’t work—in fact, over ⅔ of CBD brands on the market now don’t contain the amount of CBD displayed on their label. The unfortunate lack of regulation has welcomed too many bad-actors and created an industry-wide hurdle in the nascent CBD market, and it’s our challenge to rebuild that trust and show consumers why we’re different. 

We really want to emphasize the efficacy and purity of our three ingredients: coffee, water, and hemp, through transparency. One simple way we strive to be transparent is by printing QR Codes linked to our CBD test results onto our product labels. We’re also looking for more good actors to enter the fold and we welcome that competition. We think more brands producing effective and lab-tested CBD-infused products in the food + bev space will bolster the industry as a whole and bring forth more widespread acceptance of CBD as a functional ingredient.

What do you predict for the food industry over the rest of the year?

We’re seeing a lot more brands offer a functional take on staple snacks and beverages. We hope that trend continues because we were huge consumers of those products in 2020 and felt they addressed needs we had. I think we’ll see a lot of bigger brands follow this trend and introduce products with probiotics, nootropics, CBD, and various other functional ingredients.

Learn more at: www.jibbycoffee.com