CRU Kafe
CRU Kafe is what your Nespresso machine has been waiting for. We are providing a software upgrade for their hardware.
Our mission is simple, to deliver the finest Organic coffee from around the world, paying particular care to three key areas.
TASTE – We aim to source the finest high altitude, speciality bean. We carefully blend together before roasting and grinding them to perfection, then immediately sealing the coffee in our capsules to capture their flavour and freshness.
ETHICS – We buy organic; and that means no nasty chemicals, pesticides or aggressive farming practices. The best beans come from the best farms – and all our growers work hard to reinvest in the community and environment around them.
ENVIRONMENT– We are committed to creating an ethically sustainable business, continually working to reduce our footprint on the planet – and that’s why our pods are biodegradable and we are working towards a fully sustainable supply chain.
In 2013 we launched with one blend, a recyclable pod and a team of friends packing coffee and sticking labels on by hand in a small office in Notting Hill.
Today we’re still in Notting Hill but the office has grown a lot along with the team. Our range has increased to four blends, we’re stocked in a host of the UK’s top retailers including Whole Foods Market, Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Jamie Oliver’s Recipease. We export to UAE, Kuwait, Ireland and Norway. We are also stocked in some of the most luxurious five star hotels in the world including the London Edition and Soho House in the UK, USA and Europe to name a few. All that combined with a robust online e-commerce engine delivering coffee directly to your home or office.
Nespresso did a fantastic job getting their machines into peoples hands. With approximately 2.5m compatible machines in the UK alone they’ve laid the track for us to approach this large market to provide them with better coffee that’s also more ethical and eco-friendly. We are changing the way people spend their mornings, we are educating people about coffee and that you don’t have to compromise on quality for convenience.
We started CRU to become the ethical and eco-friendly alternative to Nespresso. We believe that we’ve succeeded in achieving this on a small scale and built our foundation, both tech and supply chain, in such a way that we can easily scale globally with the right partners. On our journey we’ve realised that the opportunity to take the same ethos, care and determination in our early success in the Nespresso market can open up enormous doors in the bean, ground and other single serve markets. Through leveraging our existing brand and team we can with very little fixed costs start to look at ways of entering into these markets.
Online: (January 2015 – September 15th)
– >4000 unique customers
– >1000 unique subscribers
– 14% growth month on month
B2B (Corporate, Retail, Hotels White Label)
– Listed in Whole Foods, Ocado, Harrods, Harvey Nichols to name a few.
– In Soho House locations around the world and several other 5 star hotels in London.
– In Jamie Olivers offices and stocked in his retail store Recipease.
– Sold to over 250 offices in the UK.
– First white label deal signed with major American partner.
Distribution:
– Selling in the UAE, Norway, Kuwait, and Ireland through partners.
– Selling in Germany through Amazon.
– Selling in the US through Soho House partnership and some large one-off relationships.
Physical Coffee Shop:
– Had our first successful pop-up coffee shop down on the Southbank this summer with London Riviera serving over 1,000 cups of coffee a week.
We will be using the Proceeds for:
– Expanding our customer base by scaling up our customer acquisition which has already been going well.
– A soft launch in the US, using an e-commerce fulfilment house (perhaps Amazon to start) and drive web traffic and Amazon traffic from the US. We think there’s a huge opportunity in the US that we intend to take advantage of.
We would look to branch out into beans and grounds as we believe there are some enormous opportunities to be had.
– Look at testing new customer acquisition channels
– Product development and packaging
– Working Capital
– Offline marketing
– HR