This startup offers coffee that's as easy to make as Lipton's tea

Steeped Coffee is trying to make life simple for coffee lovers.

The Scotts Valley-based company, legally known as Steeped Inc., offers coffee in bags that can be steeped like tea.

"There's no machines required," said CEO Josh Wilbur, who founded the company in 2017. "It's essentially coffee, simplified."

Wilbur got the inspiration for Steeped when he took a Thanksgiving trip to visit his in-laws. He wanted to enjoy a good cup of coffee while visiting, but was reluctant to take along all his brewing supplies.

"I didn't want to bring a whole suitcase of equipment ... I didn't want to do Folgers or pods or something like that," Wilbur said. "I set off on a bit of a journey to solve that."

After a year of making international trips, working with barista experts to find a manufacturing and brewing method that worked, Wilbur finally had a product to launch. He patterned his coffee method after the tried-and-true one for brewing single cups of tea.

Steeped coffee comes in single-serve bags, just like Lipton's or Tazo's tea. To make a fresh cup, you just have to heat up some water, dunk the bag in and let it steep for five or so minutes.

"It's literally as good as having a cup of coffee at the coffee shop, but at home or at work," Wilbur said.

Steeped is focused on sustainability

Lots of brewing methods these days promise a quality cup of coffee, many of them in similarly easy-to-make ways. What makes Steeped's method different is that it doesn't require any extra equipment and doesn't result in any destined-for-a-landfill plastic waste.

Instead, Steeped designed its packaging with the environment in mind. Its bags and even the film it wraps around them are commercially compostable. And the cardboard boxes it puts them in are largely made with recycled materials and are recyclable themselves.

It keeps its coffee fresh by removing the oxygen from the bags and sealing the film so no air gets in.

"We are literally disrupting the single serve space," Wilbur said. "We're removing the need for a machine, we're adding sustainability ... and we're just removing all the barriers to entry."

In addition to his Thanksgiving trip and his international sojourns, Wilbur was inspired to form Steeped just by living in the Santa Cruz area. Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz offer a vibrant coffee culture, thanks to companies like Cat & Cloud and Verve Coffee Roasters, Wilbur said.

"You can't grow up in Santa Cruz without learning more about coffee," Wilbur said. He continued; "There's a real deep connection to specialty coffee, and what that actually means — not just for quality, but also for ethics and sourcing."

The company's been gaining notoriety

That emphasis on ethics served as a kind of spur for the type of company Wilbur created. He formed Steeped as a benefit corporation, which means that it's trying to generate a "double bottom line" of profit and purpose, he said.

Steeped offers a variety of different blends and roasts of its coffee as well as decaf. It sells its coffee online and through retailers like Whole Foods Market Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp.

It's already gained attention for its efforts. The company's raised $3.3 million in venture funding to date from investors including 1flourish Capital. The makers of other coffee brands, including La Colombe, Counter Culture and Cat & Cloud, were so impressed with Steeped coffee bags that they've signed deals with it, paying Steeped to package their coffee.

And in September, Steeped's coffee was named the best new coffee or tea by the Nexty Awards, which recognizes manufacturers of natural products.

Wilbur sees a big opportunity ahead for his company. The retail market for coffee in the U.S. this year will be $46.2 billion, according to an estimate from IBISWorld.

That's a huge market, but Steeped has a chance to expand it, in part by claiming more space at grocery stores. If you look at the shelves in the typical grocery, you'll find about three times as much space allocated to tea as to coffee, Wilbur said. That's all due to tea bags, he said.

Tea bags offer "a convenient method with no barrier to entry that everyone can enjoy," he said.

Steeped is trying to do the same for coffee.