Have your coffee and eat it too

It’s 7:55 a.m. and your class starts in five min­utes. You’re run­ning late, and though you’ve show­ered, pulled on a clean sweater and packed your book bag, you’ve neglected to eat break­fast, the most impor­tant meal of the day. You manage to arrive on time, yet you’re hungry, thinking more about the morning coffee and the three-​​egg omelet you wish you’d made than your professor’s lec­ture and the impending exam worth a quarter of your grade. For the next 60 min­utes, time passes slowly, even imper­cep­tibly, until your pro­fessor says those two hal­lowed words that you have longed to hear—“Class dismissed”—and you scurry out of the room in search of sustenance.

Johnny Fayad and Ali Kothari, both DMSB’17, are no strangers to this sce­nario. In the fall 2013, they rou­tinely skipped their morning coffee in order to make their 8 a.m. finan­cial accounting course. The daily problem needed a per­ma­nent solu­tion and Fayad thought he had the answer: “Why not just eat our coffee?”

A few months later, the fledg­ling entre­pre­neurs founded New Grounds Food and joined the Husky Startup Chal­lenge, a busi­ness devel­op­ment com­pe­ti­tion run by the North­eastern Entre­pre­neurs Club. “If you have an idea, the Husky Startup Chal­lenge is a great resource,” says Kothari, a third-​​year busi­ness major with con­cen­tra­tions in entre­pre­neur­ship, finance and sus­tain­able busi­ness prac­tices. The program’s boot camps and net­working events, he says, “really helped us think about the via­bility of our busi­ness in terms of our poten­tial cus­tomers and our price points.”

In short order, Kothari and Fayad started making trial batch after trial batch of their flag­ship product, the Cof­feebar, a first-​​of-​​its-​​kind all-​​natural energy bar infused with a full cup of fair trade coffee and fla­vored to repli­cate their morning cup of mocha latte. The product’s target audi­ence is col­lege stu­dents, young pro­fes­sionals and those with unusual sched­ules, like doc­tors and truck drivers.

“Our mis­sion is to pro­vide people with a healthier way to stay ener­gized throughout the day,” says Fayad, a third-​​year busi­ness major with con­cen­tra­tions in entre­pre­neur­ship, finance and supply chain man­age­ment. “We don’t want to replace coffee, but rather pro­vide an alter­na­tive when you’re run­ning late and you don’t have time for break­fast or may need a second cup for later in the day.”

Even­tu­ally they per­fected their recipe—cinnamon, choco­late chips, a full shot of espresso—and handed out free sam­ples to people who attended the startup chal­lenge Demo Day, where they grabbed the atten­tion of IDEA, the university’s student-​​​​run ven­ture accel­er­ator.

Since then, IDEA has awarded Fayad and Kothari $10,000 in gap funding; hooked them up with a lawyer; and con­nected them with the former supply chain man­ager of 2 Degrees Food, a buy-​​one-​​give-​​one food com­pany à la Toms Shoes.

“The gap funding really kicked our busi­ness for­ward,” Kothari says, “but even more mean­ingful have been the men­tors in and out of the food industry who have been able to help us along our journey.”

The best piece of advice they have received from IDEA’s men­tors, Fayad says, is to “start small and grow from there.”

“Con­trol your growth,” they were told, “and scale accordingly.”

Fayad and Kothari started by taste-​​testing the Cof­feebar in bike shops and cafes, including Wired Puppy on New­bury Street in Boston. Their ulti­mate busi­ness goal is to sell the product in Whole Foods and through an online sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, a pair of lofty inten­tions for which they will need more funding.

Over the past year, Fayad and Kothari have raised $45,000 in seed funding from angel investors, including Michael Bronner, a serial entre­pre­neur whose latest ven­ture aims to unjunk junk food. On Monday at 9 a.m., the entre­pre­neurs in training launched a Kick­starter cam­paign to raise an addi­tional $10,000, all of which will go toward pack­aging the min­imum order of Cof­fee­bars, which are cur­rently being man­u­fac­tured in a com­mer­cial kitchen. The pack­aging, designed by Scout, Northeastern’s student-​​run design studio, takes aim at the poten­tial customer’s heart and her head: Below the logo embla­zoned on the wrapper—a pic­ture of a mug with a bite taken out of it—is the selling point, a whim­sical take on the tasty, yet healthy product. “Trust me, I taste amazing. Oh, and I’m healthy too, with plenty of pro­tein, fiber, and coffee to keep you going. Go ahead, eat me….”

Although the mocha latte-​​flavored Cof­feebar has yet to hit the super­market shelves, Fayad and Kothari have plenty of ideas for future fla­vors, including pumpkin spike and pep­per­mint mocha. But the future of New Grounds Food, they say, will hinge on the suc­cess of the Kick­starter cam­paign. “The results of the cam­paign will really tell our tale,” Fayad notes. “We look for­ward to seeing how people respond to our story and where this will take us.”