"When I tell my friends that I'm going into coffee delivery, they smile. They tell me: you've never been a barista", Smiles Vincent Meyer. And yet. At 33, this French from New York has just launched Goffee, a start-up that intends to revolutionize the delivery of coffee and tea in the United States, starting with New York.
Unlike delivery services like Uber Eats or Seamless, the company prepares the coffee itself in a Midtown workshop from grains used by well-known brands (Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Toby's Estate, etc.). She delivers them, on foot, in containers looking like gourds that she comes to pick up the next day so as to avoid waste. "We deliver 250-300 mugs a day "says the Parisian.
Before delivering the coffee, Vincent Meyer consumed a lot. Responsible for opening international markets for Criteo at the time when the company retargeting advertising had only twenty employees, he launched the offices of London and those of Palo Alto, where he came with the founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle in 2009. After the start-up of the start-up in 2013, the French decided to move to New York. "It was 25 when I started and 1400 at the time of the IPO. Jean-Baptiste has decided to return to France. I was offered to come back too but I was good in the United States ".
In the Big Apple, he works as a developer in several boxes, including Jump Ramp Games, the first lotto application. But an idea turlupine. When he orders his coffees at Starbucks in advance via the chain application, he often finds himself in line before getting his hands on it. "I was the best customer but at the same time the one that was the least well treated". He also remembers a conversation in Palo Alto with the founder of Philz Coffee, his favorite coffee brand. He told him that he would not go to New York, but the Frenchman could order Philz's grain online and have his coffee at home. "It made a difference, he recalls. The difference between Starbucks, Dunkin or Philz is not in the method of preparation, but in their grains. 98% of these brands sell them in retail ". No need, therefore, to go to the store. The idea of making an online coffee platform, deliverable at the customer's desired time directly to his office, sprouts in his mind.
Another factor that drives him to launch: the poor quality of delivery by existing services, such as Uber Eats or GrubHub. "The cups used by coffee chains are not suitable for the preservation of heat or foam. In addition, there is an inflation of the price of coffee at the moment. We are far from dollar coffee! We are more between $ 4-4.50 without tips today. Adding shipping costs significantly increases prices".
To meet its challenges, Goffee's coffee arrives in sealed containers that preserve the temperature of the drink. The re-use of these "mugs" also reduces costs. In addition, Goffee does not charge delivery fees: coffees are brought directly to the offices by employees who prepare them. This model reduces operating costs while preventing customers from queuing for cappuccino or matcha. Another advantage of the business: deliveries are very predictable ("we change little coffee or time when we take it"), Which facilitates the management of production.
For the moment, Goffee is only addressing companies that have at least twenty employees in order to group orders. Its target: office managers who have to meet the increasingly diverse coffee needs of their employees. "The coffee budget of the boxes continues to increase. This is the race for different options: black coffee, cold brew, espresso … The office manager sees the list of requests increase and knows that not everyone can be satisfied. We thought there was an angle for us"Says the company manager.
To grow, Goffee wants to expand her service to the other floors of the office buildings she already serves and target other business districts. In order to facilitate delivery, she intends to open other preparation workshops elsewhere in the city. After Midtown Manhattan, Union Square and the Financial District are in the boxes. "No one has bets on this approach of doing both production and delivery. But when we see the merger between DoorDash and Caviar, the IPO of DoorDash, we say that there is money in the economy of delivery, says Vincent Meyer. We will have an interesting future, either by positioning ourselves on the margins of existing structures, or by joining a".
