Founder Feature: Greg Cahn of Tamar Date Coffee

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1:34I think for us right now, we're trying to be really thoughtful and really surgical about our growth, really strategic. You know, the focus right now on the retail side is independent, natural grocery, California focus, where we can really demo, really be there on site. You know, that's what's so good about the farmer's market is I get to really educate because we're first to market here. If you Google date coffee, we'll be on page one. We're on page one there, but it's not a big search volume, right, because it's a totally new category. What will populate is date seed coffee. Hey, everybody. This is Caitlin Brooker, editor at Startup CPG.

2:09we are back with another founder feature. How's everyone feeling about coffee? Are you a coffee freak or looking to lessen your caffeine intake? What about dates? Because I'm a self-proclaimed date freak. Today we're talking with Greg Kahn, co-founder of Tamar Date Coffee. Greg's turned his personal coffee struggles into a game-changing product that's part coffee, part dates, including the upcycled date seeds that would otherwise be waste. From his background in the music industry to becoming first to market in the date coffee category, Greg's proving that sometimes the best innovations come from solving your own problems.

2:44We'll dive into how he's building a brand with just two ingredients, why the branding caught my eye, and what it's like to educate consumers on a completely new category. This conversation might change how you think about your next morning cup. Enjoy.

3:03Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Greg Kahn, co-founder of Tamar Date Coffee. Greg, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Caitlin. Really excited about this. It's been a long time coming. Thank you so much for being so flexible and understanding toddler life. We are very happy to finally have you here. I know that life very well. It's easy. And again, just we're really grateful for Startup CPG. So respected in the industry. And so to be here talking about Tamar today is just a big thrill. And so, yeah, I'm easy. I'm very easy.

3:40Great. Well, let's dive into it. For anybody who's listening that doesn't know who Tamar is, can you just give us a little brief description of what Tamar is? Sure. So Tamar, so our brand name is Tamar, Tamar Date Coffee. We do a very non-sophisticated blend of coffee, which is we have our first cue, which is what we call our original blend, which we call it balance. It's 50 % coffee and it's 50 % dates. Of that 50 % of the dates, 35 % is date seeds. 15 % is the date fruit dried and ground into what we call date sugar or date powder. Some people, the industry doesn't like the word sugar, but it is date sugar, the healthiest.

4:25sweetener, the healthiest sugar. But so we serve date coffee. And the biggest question that people always ask me is, does it taste like coffee? It does because it is coffee. It's just blended with dates. That's a great question. I'm sure many people are probably like, is it actually coffee or is it dates? But it's a blend of both. So that's great to know. Yeah, it's not infused. It's not extracted. It's just two amazing ingredients blended together. I love that. Did you love coffee first or did you love dates first? I loved coffee first and then I fell in love with dates. But I had a big problem with coffee, which for me, my big pain point was coffee has been too acidic for me.

5:13I struggle with acid reflux forever. And eventually it got to a place where I just, I needed to make a change because it was just not, the experience of drinking coffee was not enjoyable. My esophagus would burn and just, it really messed with my stomach and messed with my whole kind of, this whole area. So when my brother-in-law, who's the maker, he was tinkering with a few things, dates and coffee, and brought me the idea, the very early iteration of the product and reached out and said, you know, you really need to, I need you to come up to the Bay. I live in Los Angeles. He's up in the Bay.

5:50And he said, I really need you to come up to the Bay and try something. I have something really interesting that I think you're going to like. The backstory of that is I've always been kind of a soundboard to him and his creations. We're both entrepreneurs at heart and, but I wasn't in food and Bev at the time. I've been in music for most of my working life, but I was looking for something. I was looking for a business to start specifically in e-com. I'm a religious, how I built this fanatic. And over the years, I just, I got to a place where I really want to start something. And as the universe works, sometimes things are just brought to you and it's just, this is the right moment.

6:25And so he had me really intrigued. I drove up to the bay and we sat down and had our first, my first cup of date coffee. And at that point, it was like this immediate light bulb of, wow, this is a coffee I can enjoy. Like I, it was the most smooth, balanced coffee that was going down my esophagus. That was just, uh, so for me, not even on a founder entrepreneur perspective, but more of like a use case as a user, it was immediate. And I, and I said, I need more of this. This is what I need. So, so that was like the beginning, the origin of saying I'm in, You have me at dates. Let's go. Now, did A.L.

7:07know about your experience with acid reflux prior to kind of saying, hey, let's try this coffee together? He didn't know like the full scope of what I was, how affected my life has been. You know, we enjoyed coffee with him for a long time, you know, over family outings. You know, we would find ourselves kind of in the corner talking about music and having a cup of coffee. And he knew that I would put honey and cinnamon in my coffee. One, to sweeten the coffee because I don't like bitter coffee. And two, to cut the acidity with the cinnamon. So he always knew that because every time I'd come up to the bay and have him pour me a cup of coffee, I'd always ask for honey and cinnamon.

7:47And he just thought it was just a thing. But it was really because my ass reflux. And I just don't like, I like to sweeten my coffee. So, but he didn't know the medication that I take. He didn't know all of the things that I kind of deal with on a day to day with acid reflux. So then when we had that cup and what I was telling him, how I was experiencing this coffee and how it was just, I was so mind blown. That's when he was like, oh, this is interesting. Maybe we have a call out here. Maybe we have a low acid coffee here. So it was, you know, over time. And now he understands. I mean, he knows what medication I'm on.

8:21I mean, he knows all the things, probably more than he ever did about acid reflux. So it was an educational moment for him, for sure. Big time. Big time. So tell me about your background. You mentioned music. What about your background makes this very important in regards to music and coffee? So since 15, 16, I've been a singer in bands, an artist, a music entrepreneur. And, you know, and then from there, it kind of I became a music supervisor for film and TV and ad. So that's what I've been doing. And that's what I've known for the last 20 plus years of my professional life. Been on stages, played festivals, did that whole thing and worked on movies and television shows and advertisements and all around music, my love for music.

9:12And I'm just, I need to do something that I'm passionate about. So that was my driver for being in the music industry all this time, which is not a very healthy industry. but but I was again I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I like to you know when I have something to say or push and find an audience I get very excited about it and I think there's this transcendent connectivity between the thing and the audience much like being on a stage and connecting with your audience and and it kind of being this this full community trend you know connective thing so when I was looking for something a little bit outside music and trying to find the product that I really wanted to dive into, when my brother-in-law, Yael, showed me the product and how I could kind of help this, the first, my instinct was, I want to build the brand because that's what I love to do.

10:01I love design. I love branding. So, and the creative side. So I really took the product, helped him kind of develop it. I was his guinea pig, tasted, you know, our initial formulation process. Like I was just drinking cups and cups and cups and really dialing in the ratio, but his strength is he's product than ops. I'm more creative sales biz dev. That's kind of where our skill sets split and intersect. So I dove into the creative, which is the thing I know, and started doing the storytelling, which is what I love. And what I found was, whether it's music or it's food and bev, CPG, the parallel is very much the same.

10:41It's storytelling. It's finding the right audience. It's connecting to that audience. It's delivering that message over and over till it feels like you don't have to deliver anymore. You're all in the same room, enjoying what we all love to enjoy, whether it's music or a cup of day coffee. So I really leaned into the parallel of just storytelling and creative. And that's what I know. So there was no kind of like transition process for me. Didn't feel like a transition or from one industry to another. It was very seamless in that sense. That does sound like it would be very seamless and also very energizing.

11:21And you've given me a lot of things that I want to touch on. One of them is the branding. I just have to say, I probably should have started out by saying this. I'm a decaf coffee drinker. I can't do caffeine anymore. I did taste Tamar, obviously, because I love dates and I love the taste of coffee. But what got me, aside from the dates, was the branding. It's just this nice, plain package with a bright yellow dot. Tell me what the inspiration was behind that. I love it. So I also brought a hat, which I'll send you. Love that. And I brought two bags, which I designed, which we designed. And this is our original 50-50.

12:02And this is our newest SKU, the 70-30, which we call Elevate. It's a little bit more caffeine. So not for your speed, but we will have something for you very soon. We're going to do a non-calf eventually all dates. But back to the yellow dot and the branding. I like circles. I like shapes. But of all the shapes, I love circles. And so when I dove in, the first thing I did was much like going to a record shop. when I was little and just going through the aisles and just looking at all the vinyl and all the CDs and all the tapes and just, you know, really gushing over album covers. I found myself in Air One and Whole Foods and Sprouts and going through the aisles and going and looking at every product, every bag, every package.

12:46And during those like weeks of just studying, it was just so ironic that I'm now in a grocery store doing the same thing that I used to do in a record shop. But I said, you know, if we're one day when we're on this shelf, how can we stick out? And if I'm in the produce section and I peek over to another section, say the coffee aisle, how are we going to, how can I find my bag from 30, 50 feet away? And then getting deeper into dates and the meaning behind dates, the backstory behind dates is dates are a desert fruit, Right. So very drought tolerant, need sun more than water, grow. So, you know, in my ideation process, I was fixated on this idea of the circle and the yellow circle signifying the desert sun.

13:37and I just, you know, kind of played and played and played. And I like minimalism. I like really simple design, Japanese design. I think like matcha. I like matcha brandings. I love matcha brands because they're very similar in that sense. They're very clean. And, you know, so I wanted that. I wanted something very simple. I wanted something that had a little bit deeper meaning, but just wasn't busy. And a lot of things were just too busy. Very, very busy. So I landed on the circle. I landed on the sun. I landed on the type, which I, you know, again, simple, but it's important and it's intentional, all lowercase.

14:15And again, the A of this type kind of like is very circular. So I just, you know, you go with your gut, you go with what you like. You know, I didn't, we didn't outsource. We have not outsourced to a creative agency yet. Everything is designed in house. I did all the design and I have a great partner who let me kind of steer the creative side, but feel very supported. And we're still in each other's minutia of, you know, his corner and my corner, but and we challenge each other. But but there's trust there, you know, so when you have a supportive partnership and you can just go with your gut, good things happen.

14:47I love everything about the branding. I am also very into simplicity, minimalism, love the sans serif. And I also love the lowercase font to actually wrote a paper when I was in college about how we should be able to use lowercase whenever we want. to and choose the fonts that we want to when we're writing papers to express emotion. I'm so sick of Times New Roman. Sorry to whoever invented it, but it's not for me. It just looks like a legal doc. Right. The other thing to your viewers, too, there was a really transformative Netflix doc that really changed me in such a good way. It's called Abstract.

15:25Have you seen this? I haven't, but I'm going to add it to my list. It's incredible. And there's two seasons and it's the, they just take similar like pioneers of different creative industries, whether it's an architect or it's a, you know, a font maker or it's a shoemaker like Tinker Hatfield who designed the Air Jordan, all types of creative industries of pioneers. And it's like an hour episode, but it is so inspiring for anyone who is in creative branding, entrepreneur. It really changed me. And so big recommendation to you and your viewers. Abstract on Netflix. Incredible. All right. Taking notes.

16:07Abstract on Netflix. Piece of advice to founders out there. Take a look. Big time. Big time. We'll be right back. A few years back when I ran a beverage company, we had to launch using those plastic sleeves to put our designs on the cans. But they looked bad. The sleeves get stretched out. They don't cover the full can. And overall, they just look and feel low quality. Lucky for you, digital can printing technology has come so far over the last few years that now you can launch your beverage brand or new SKUs with a fully printed look, and it's at similar pricing to those plastic sleeves. Our friends at CanWorks, which is the largest U.S.-based digital can printer, are happy to work with our community at very low minimums, even one pallet.

16:45They've got locations in the East Coast, the West Coast, Texas. Get in touch with them through our contact form. It's at canworksprinting.com slash startupcpg.

17:00And what about the brand name, Tamar? What does Tamar mean? So Tamar is Ayal's mother's name. So my brother-in-law, the maker's mother's name. And a couple of things, the backstory on that. So it's a pretty special name. It is basically the universal name for the date palm. So it means the date palm in Hebrew, means the date palm, basically in Arabic, just a slightly different variation of Tamar. In Armenian, Tamar, Tamera, Tamara. It all means the date poem, which I loved. And when he told me that, and I just said, that's, that's like, we were messing with all different variations of dates. And, and then also like for me back to like creative, like I think just visually, it's just a very stunning looking word.

17:48It's short. It's got two A's in it. Like it's just the M kind of centers it a bit. So when I saw it and I was writing it down, I was looking at it. It was really like visually stunning. And so all of those things just made me really set on that name. But the back end of that is it's his mother's name and mother. And I just I love so. It is very balanced when you look at it. It's just very simple, very beautiful. And with the font, it's very elegant looking, but very simple too. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. That's a cool story. I never, I did not know that about Tamar and dates and Tamara. Now, anytime I hear somebody with the name Tamara, that's what I'm going to think is dates.

18:31Yeah. I mean, to not get too religious, but like it's a biblical name, meaning the date, date palm. And the date obviously is a very ancient fruit. So it's just a, and dates. And again, this could be a whole other podcast on dates, but dates are amazing. They're an amazing, ancient, modern fruit that is in so many ways so important for us, especially now, being that they are a desert fruit with so much nutritional profile that doesn't require a lot of water. That's drought tolerant and super sustainable. So it's like, whoa. I think people often hear about the beneficial properties of the fruit itself, but you're actually using the seed too.

19:12So can you tell us what the properties of the seed hold for people who want to drink Tamar? So the seed, which is not the sweet part, right? The pitted date is where the sweetness lies. The pit or the seed, which is a wasted product, which was the thing that initially I really loved when he was explaining, you know, what we were doing here. And I said, wow, So you're taking the pit that is otherwise waste, that people pit a date, throw it in the trash. You're telling me that that thing is going back in and we're upcycling that. And I love that. So the pit, the seed, what we're doing is we are roasting it just like a coffee bean and then grinding it down into ground date, just like ground coffee.

20:02So it behaves very similar to a coffee bean in terms of time and temperature. So anywhere from, let's say, a medium roast of a coffee bean is very similar to a medium roast of a date seed. I mean, they're really close in temperature and time. So like 4.30, 4.50, 4.60 degrees, 12 minutes, 13 minutes, 14 minutes, all very, very similar in that frame. And that is basically it. So then what we're doing is our farm, which is the seed is waste or what they do is because there's not much of a market for it. They send it to animal farms for cattle feed just to get something out of that seed, which is crazy to me because we should be ingesting that seed.

20:48We should be consuming that. No disrespect to cows, but, you know, they don't fiber. I mean, so the seeds, the nutritional properties of the seed is high dietary fiber, like loaded with fiber. iron, potassium, like antioxidant polyphenols loaded. Like the nutritional profile of the seed is insane. Like if you were to eat our coffee, you would get, and this is not instant, but if you were to eat it, we have 10 grams of fiber per serving in this thing. Now, what we're doing right now with our packaging is not misleading anyone in the sense that this is not instant. You have to brew this. So by extraction, you're going to extract anywhere between 10 to 20 % of those values.

21:32But what's so amazing about that is that there's no fiber in coffee and coffee companies don't require a nutritional label. Most coffee bags, you'll never see a nutritional label, but we're required because we have a fruit blended with coffee. So we have to have a nutritional label on our packaging, right? That's what to me is so earth shattering about this product is that because of the dates being blended with the coffee, you're getting a very nutritious, nutrient dense, like very nutrient rich coffee. And so fiber, iron, potassium, things that you would not find in 100 % Arabica Robusta coffee you're finding in the date coffee.

22:08So and that's primarily because of that date seed, which is a waste product. So we're upcycling that back into the market and giving it to humans, not just cows. I love that. I love when brands are finding new ways to take ingredients that would otherwise be waste because there's so much of it. There's ingredients in crisis right now. It's just very refreshing to hear brands who are finding ways to just make the most out of the ingredients that they have. And it's simple. This is not a sophisticated product. I mean, there's two, talk about clean label, this is two ingredients. It's coffee and dates.

22:43And of the dates, we're using the whole date. We're using both parts of the date, the seed and the fruit. That's the thing to me also is this is not like this very new agey coffee. That's not really coffee. That's a total coffee substitute. No, this is a coffee alternative, not a coffee substitute. We love coffee. We just wanted less of it. We wanted caffeine. We just wanted to reduce it. And we wanted a less acidic coffee and the dates naturally cut the acidity and the dates are really easy on the stomach. So like for people who have stomach issues, when they go to the bathroom after a cup of coffee, this coffee like totally neutralizes your stomach.

23:17So I don't go to the bathroom at all. Like I really don't. Like when I go back to 100 % Arabica coffee, that's when I find, wow, like that's where it's like, oh, there's a difference here. Like, so it's those types of like little things where you can load up on the health benefits and the call outs, but it's also the experience of drinking this product. And I think that's the thing that is a little bit invisible until you you do it and you and you experience it and then you know because like some things you just have to experience you can't just say oh I'm going to eat this or drink this because it has all these health benefits and call outs but then you don't really enjoy it or you don't experience it but this is a really good experience tell me a little bit more about the experience for people who have not tried Tamar yet what could they expect in comparison to a more mainstream cup of coffee?

24:06So I do the farmer's market on Sundays, which is like the best because you really get real time people, real time data. And so I do the Brentwood farmer's market here in Los Angeles and I have a lot of fun and I sell a lot of bags to generally mostly people who've never had day coffee in their life. And there was a funny comment this past Sunday of a guy who said, I kind of like when coffee kicks me. I drink a lot of caffeine. I do espresso. So I don't know if your half and half is going to do it for me. You should go with our Elevate, which is our 70-30, a little higher caffeine, more like 95 milligrams of caffeine compared to a Starbucks 8-ounce, which is like 145 milligrams.

24:46But a little lesser caffeine, but still up there for you. But what I told them was, this coffee is not going to kick you. It's going to hug you. And that's the experience is that when you drink this, it really don't have the jitters. You really don't. You don't have, you know, that, that term like is tossed around a lot. Oh, no jitters, no crash, no this, no that. I don't really don't have those emotional swings. I feel like it just naturally nicely climbs, you know, to a certain peak level and just stays there. I used to be a caffeine freak. Like I had a caffeine problem that I needed to cut one because caffeine also exacerbates acid reflux, but I needed to cut my caffeine because I was having like anxiety and the over caffeinated drinks were doing it for me.

25:29But like any habit, 21 days, change your habit, change, get to a new baseline and then that's your new baseline. So anyone is, you know, it's possible for anyone to change their baseline into something better for them. People are so stuck at a certain baseline. But when I changed it, I felt better. I drink two cups of this every morning out of a French press and I don't need to cut to touch coffee for the, you know, past nine, 10 o 'clock AM. And I am productive and I'm not overly anxious and overly jittery and overly stimulated and I sleep great. And so the, and I just feel, it just feels nice and it's easy on my stomach and it's less acidic and it's naturally sweet.

26:12I don't have to add any sort of vanilla creamer honey, which is high sugar content, which I love honey, but again, it's not as healthy of a sweetener as date sugar. Date sugar is of the three healthiest sweeteners, monk fruit, coconut sugar, and date sugar. Those are like the top three that you'll find on Google and if you read on sweeteners, alternative sweeteners. Date sugar is the lowest on the glycemic index. So we will argue of all the sweeteners, all the sugars out there. Honey's good for you. Maple syrup, good for you. There's There's good sweeteners out there, but date sugar, your body knows what to do with the date sugar.