Our Place in the Coffee Industry: Holy Joe

It’s hard improving on something that’s already extremely good.

As well as constant sunshine and languid coastlines, Australia has a history of vibrant multicultural communities creating incredible coffee from very limited resources. Stove-top coffee, pour-over coffee, Vietnamese coffee, Turkish coffee, scotch coffee: name a community and allow them to point you towards a hardy way to make coffee on a budget.

Fast-forward a few decades and well-styled cafes with $20,000 machines produce a quick, consistent and ultimately delicious espresso that forms the basis for flat whites, cappuccinos and macchiatos. Even outside the mother-country, examples of Australian-run coffee ventures have popped up in Lisbon and New York, turning acrid batch brew parlors into sleek and bustling coffee houses packed full of flavour. People love Australian coffee, including me.

Our job as a new company is to innovate within a very competitive and much loved industry, which while difficult, is where our skill set comes in handy.

Although you can usually find me prepping a 19L cold drip tower, I actually got my start in coffee at a small charity cafe based in Brisbane. It served some of Brisbane’s more colourful patrons, where a flat white with seven sugars wasn’t an uncommon order.
I mastered the basics, and could come up with an excellent coffee with a very tidy nine-leaf tulip if you gave me ten minutes to do so.
In short: I was a slow barista, but the love of coffee never left.

Years passed, and I steadily found slower ways to brew coffee without annoying any customers.
The cabin where I used to live was filled with scorched timber as I built cold drip towers from scratch; selling them locally in our family’s store. 
The design became a feature piece at home if I don’t say so myself, and created an incredibly smooth bottle of coffee over twelve hours owing to the lack of heat required in the brewing process.
This is where things started to take shape; I’d always loved the idea of creating a brand that had incredible flavour and design at its heart, but knew that I’d be swan-diving into a saturated market where everyone had a different idea of the ‘perfect’ taste.

I had a few lifelines at this point. An unnamed pandemic gave me some space to think, so I mashed my neurons together to conceptualise a high-end coffee that utilised medicinal mushrooms. More on that here. 
I also joined forces with a great business partner (and future brother-in-law); Christian. He’s good at soccer, and likes organising things. 

My immediate family are all creative geniuses in their own realms, which greased the wheels when it came to planning and eventually releasing Holy Joe to the world. 

As a concept, things were starting to move at Holy Joe. We tied together the product with the help of a very talented designer, and decided to visually pitch to customers almost as if our bottles were premium whiskey. 

The health market in Australia is a fast-growing sector and principles such as Organic, Non-GMO , Biodynamic and Di-Dao are all steadily becoming more mainstream as Western culture begins to unpick the subtle yet damaging aspects of our lifestyle.
Leaky-gut syndrome: linked to pesticide usage.
Long term oxidative stress and inflammation: linked to multiple characteristics of a grain-based western diet and a 9-5 sedentary work day.
It’s a long list, and it takes a certain type of customer to decide that they want to dial in on a lifestyle that will maintain their long term health.

We didn’t actually set up Holy Joe with a clinical mindset behind us, and it wasn’t a purely tactical decision to create a bottle that ticked the boxes of health and coffee.
We genuinely think that the world would be a better place with more organic products on shelves, and a wide array of healthy supplements easily available to the public.

Quite frankly, I prefer healthy rain forests to wheat and soy plantations and think that the world can feed and regenerate itself without compromising on food security.

To conclude, this is an opener on where we’ve found ourselves in a market chock-full of great and useful products. Like all good companies we find ourselves learning something new every day, and we aim to keep it that way.

We hope you enjoy Holy Joe, however you like to drink it.