Inspired by their own morning routines, Hannah Mendoza and Roger Coppola co-founded Clevr Blends. As pioneers in the better-for-you coffee category, Hannah and Roger have reshaped classic cafe-style drinks like Matcha, Chai, and Coffee lattes, and infused them with adaptogens, functional mushrooms, and better-than-barista ingredients. Along the way, they have been named one of Oprah’s Favorite Things two years in a row and brought in notable celebrity investors. I sat down with Hannah to learn more about her journey as an entrepreneur, what inspired Clevr, and how the challenges of a CPG entrepreneur have changed in recent years.
Dave Knox: You are seven years into the journey with Clevr. What inspired you to create Clevr and lead it to where it stands today?
Hannah Mendoza: I have a long-standing passion for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry and food systems, after cutting my teeth at college working at an incredible brand that sourced direct-trade superfoods and herbs from farmers using regenerative and permaculture-informed practices.
Whilst there, I was drinking regular coffee from coffee shops and loved the energy it gave me, but it was 50/ 50 whether I was going to feel superhuman, or an overstimulated mess. We had access to every powder, herb, and adaptogen under the sun and we ritually gathered each morning to make these crazy, 10-ingredient latte concoctions. I noticed a marked difference in my mood, stress levels, and sleep vs coffee—the light bulb moment for me!
Simultaneously, my now co-founder Roger started getting into functional ingredients and adaptogens to help deal with anxiety. We connected on how impactful these ingredients had been for us, leading us to break from our careers to launch an alternative coffee bar.
We hand-built a mobile coffee bar, squeezed it in a van and drove around the country, making creative takes on traditional coffee shop drinks using mushrooms, herbs, and adaptogens to help with energy, stress and sleep.
People loved how the drinks made them feel, and we were always asked, ‘how do I recreate this at home?’ We knew that what we were making had value, but also that it was very unapproachable (15 different ingredients, plant milks, etc). Roger challenged me: “If you can make a just-add-water instant drink that has the same taste and quality as something we’d serve at this coffee bar, we’ll do this thing.” We looked at the instant drink space, and it had so much opportunity as a culturally salient, hyper-convenient category, but with a quality standard so low, it felt stuck in the ’80s. After a year formulating the best instant drink that we’d ever tried, using better-than-coffee-shop ingredients to push the bar on taste and texture, we officially launched Clevr in 2019.
Knox: It’s one thing to create a product in your home kitchen, but transforming that into a shelf-stable product, suitable for bag packaging and co-packer production, is a whole different challenge. How did you navigate this journey?
Mendoza: Oddly, our naivety around commercialization worked to our advantage. Designing a product with taste and quality in mind as opposed to focusing on commercial viability helped us create something that really resonated with customers. Even now, we’ve never used a product formulation company – we really believe that starting in your home kitchen is the best way to create something that will appeal to everyday people. We knew we had to commercialize it, a process that involved many phone calls to people who knew more than us. We had to rapidly build an extended network in order to figure out how to turn our idea into reality.
We made the product ourselves for the first 18 months, in the kitchen 7 days a week. We worked on the DTC business during daylight hours, then used a shared commercial kitchen at nighttime. Weekends were for events, getting real-time feedback from customers. We didn’t deal with a co-packer as we made everything ourselves—tough, but with the eternal advantage that we got to know the product better than anyone else could have.
Knox: You mentioned the hands-on approach of using a commercial kitchen. Many find it challenging to transition from being a beloved local brand to establishing a broader growth brand with online sales and a global reach. Considering others in the commercial kitchen might be focusing on local markets, what gave you the confidence to envision a more expansive trajectory for your brand?
Mendoza: Consistent feedback that these products were changing people’s days, their energy levels and the way they felt physically helped us realize there was strong consumer resonance. If the reception had been lukewarm, we wouldn’t have been confident enough to think bigger. A limited budget meant we couldn’t pursue traditional marketing channels at the beginning, so we had to get out and do events, where people tried the product. Their reactions gave us the confidence to go all in, as Roger and I were at a time in our lives where our appetite for risk was high, meaning we were brave enough (just) to make the leap.
Knox: With the personal connection you have to adaptogens and their burgeoning popularity, it’s apparent some brands might not be utilizing them properly, focusing more on the trendiness of the ingredient rather than its true potential. How do you enlighten consumers about adaptogens, ensuring they’re not only aware of its benefits but also educated on the correct way to incorporate them?
Mendoza: I remember walking the aisles at Erewhon and seeing adaptogens in everything from donuts to mac & cheese. Whilst not being critical of that, as it’s a great way to familiarize consumers with these ingredients, it’s not appropriate to promise benefits unless they are in functional doses and you’re consuming them daily (which could be true for mac & cheese and donuts, but that’s another discussion.)
The best way for us to ensure people are using these ingredients in ways that will benefit them is to create products that are habitual – that’s why coffee and tea stood out to us from the start as there is no more ubiquitous daily ritual.
We are overwhelmed currently with ways to optimize our lives – vitamins, supplements, diet, skincare, exercise. Whilst it’s relatively easy for people to create new habits, it’s very hard to stick to them, especially if that requires behavioral change.
Our aim is to create approachable products that are an extension of people’s existing routines, that don’t require further sacrifice. That’s why we obsessively focus on taste and texture, because if a routine change requires sacrifice, it’s much less likely to endure.
People are looking harder than ever at how they feel in their bodies and minds, and the impact of increasingly high-stress, high-speed lifestyles. Our contribution, alongside other amazing brands in our space, is to expose people to a more natural path of addressing that stress and overwhelm.
Knox: As Clevr has grown, you’ve diversified your offerings, not just in terms of latte flavors but also through novel products like SuperTea. Can you shed some light on how you’ve steered your product innovation, encompassing both new variants and entirely new products?
Mendoza: The source for everything we do is listening to customers. When we think about where we’re going and what our roadmap looks like, it’s very easy for me as a founder who is still running our product formulation to get caught up in what I think we should be making and my fun ideas for the list of a hundred things that I would love to see us create.
I’ve had to learn to temper myself and consistently revert to our brand direction, specifically how we can be of service to the customers and community who have also invested in us. That involves constantly asking them: what does your day look like, where are the gaps, where are the things you need help with, can we make a product that’s designed around that?
We started with making Matcha, Chai, and Coffee, then added Sleep last year, along with our hydration product, SuperTeas, this year. The reason we made these is because people asked for them; that’s become the guiding principle of everything that we do.
Knox: Reflecting on your journey, could you delineate the key challenges you encountered after Clevr’s launch? When you realized that you had something that was working, what challenges did you face in those early days?
Mendoza: So many. We now realize that we tried to do everything ourselves for too long. We also were unhappy with anything less than perfection, which inevitably slowed us down.
For example, it took us six months to design our packaging and 10 months to build our website because we were doing it without help. We were so close to what we were doing that we couldn’t see that we were too detail-oriented. We weren’t okay with just putting an MVP out there – tough to do when your passion makes you a perfectionist.
Hindsight makes me realize there are no prizes for that approach, and I’d try to instill more of a ‘move-fast and break-things’ mentality. We should have invested in building a team a lot earlier to give us more bandwidth, as opposed to just relying on longer days, later hours, and more grit and hustle. We actually would’ve got to where we wanted faster if we had put the right people in place at the beginning.
Lessons emerging more recently have been learnt the hard way – we can’t do everything, everywhere, all at once. When the dream is big, the list of new products, content, channels, and campaigns that help you get closer to reaching it is long. Our intensity meant we tried to pursue everything in the moment as fast as we could. That turned out to be impossible and meant we were setting our team up for failure. Since then, I have learned how to say no to ideas and opportunities, to take on fewer things but hopefully do them bigger & better.
Finally, as we became more sophisticated in assessing what was and wasn’t working in the business, we sometimes overlooked business fundamentals. For example, if we aimed for greater customer retention, we may set up elaborate AB testing, email flow, creating another subscription incentive program whilst forgetting to take a step back and ask ‘what’s going on with customer service, how long does it take someone to get the help they need, what about product quality, when did we last ask customers if there was anything we could improve?’. Remembering to take a step back and look at business fundamentals has been a valuable learning for us.
Knox: Observing the shifts in the CPG sector over the past decade, it’s fascinating how we’ve transitioned from entrepreneurs struggling to secure funding to a fervor for disruption in nearly every category. Given the unique trajectory of the past year, how would you advise budding entrepreneurs aiming to make their mark in the CPG landscape today? What approach should they embrace in today’s market?
Mendoza: Have complete clarity and confidence about your differentiators from the beginning, whilst making sure that others – advisors or potential customers – also recognize these. Validating your concept early and talking to people will save a lot of time in the future. We have access to so much information, and not getting swept away in the excitement is important – you have to truly decide if this is the thing you want to pursue and if you are doing so correctly.
Some things will never be wrong – join an industry Slack channel, cold message people on LinkedIn, resource yourself with the kindness of others (most people really get a kick out of helping). Doing all that early on is the best and most efficient way to learn quickly.
Don’t obsess about competition in a counter-productive way. We’ve evolved so much in recent years, but this industry is fast-moving. Understand the other people in the space, know what your unique differentiator is whilst understanding that CPG is not a winner-takes-all category. Tech mentality can make people think that, but there can be more than one winner in these disruptive categories.
If your disruption creates a space where other disruptive products enter as they see potential, the market gets 10% bigger, with probable benefits for you. Zooming out, accepting the ‘rising tide raises all ships’ mentality is also really important.
I had a wonderful encounter earlier this year at an event where I saw another founder from a brand in a pretty similar space to us – Rasa. I spontaneously went over to share how much I respected and appreciated her, given we have the same desire for improving the way people feel in their bodies and minds. Although we’re working on that in slightly different ways, we are in the same space and we ended up becoming friends, grabbing a three-hour dinner, sharing tips and so much about what it was like to build a business. In CPG, there’s such an amazing opportunity to create a collaborative environment, as opposed to a hyper-competitive environment, and it’ll make the journey a lot more fun too.
Knox: Reflecting on the surge of emerging brands, it’s evident that while some entrepreneurs are driven by market gaps, others, like yourself, are propelled by personal passion. To what extent do you believe your success can be attributed to your deep-rooted passion for spreading adaptogen awareness and your personal journey, as opposed to simply capitalizing on a market void?
Mendoza: I think it was very much the personal route for us. I was young when we started Clevr, without the ability to think strategically or commercially enough to directly identify a white space. Intuitively, we felt there was something missing and that we could provide that, but the way we got there was deeply personal. The product journey has helped because an alternate reality where we identified a market gap, raised money, hired a product development company and a co-manufacturer meant we would have been much more remote from people’s experience with Clevr. Building everything in an intimate and personal way from scratch may not be the right path for everyone, but I believe it created an authenticity in the brand that I hope customers feel and resonate with.
Knox: Looking into the upcoming year, what should we anticipate from Clevr?
Mendoza: We are growing our team, which is really exciting. It’s about time! We’ve been doing this very scrappily for a while, and I’m looking forward to having some incredible people coming onboard.
We have some retail expansions on the horizon and are always working on more ways to engage with our community and expand our reach. I feel I am always choosing between a hundred different new product ideas that are competing for attention as well. Most recently, we launched an exciting new London Fog SuperLatte blend which officially went live last week, right in time for Fall and the holiday season ahead. It’s a cozy, luxurious Earl Grey latte, with sweet Indonesian vanilla and Italian bergamot oil – of course boosted with adaptogens, probiotics, and the perfect microdose of caffeine for a grounded energy boost.
We’re also launching a really special project, more on the mission-driven end of what we do, which is a food systems resiliency fund. It will be in collaboration with a local nonprofit SBFAN, a local food justice non profit in Santa Barbara. We’re rolling out a grant program to champion projects within the realms of food justice, food sovereignty, and agroecology. We’re so excited about what’s to come.
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