David and Ethan Sanborn, a father-son duo, have created Kiid Coffee, a unique beverage designed specifically for children. This episode delves into their entrepreneurial journey, highlighting Ethan's inspiration behind the product and their collaborative efforts in developing a nutritious decaf coffee that caters to kids. Ethan, at just eight years old, expresses his desire to start a business and earn some money, showcasing the innocence and ambition of youth. His father, David, shares insights into the challenges they faced in ensuring the coffee was suitable for children, particularly regarding the caffeine content, taste, and nutritional value. The conversation reveals the importance of understanding children’s needs and preferences in product development, as well as the Sanborns’ commitment to creating a healthy alternative to traditional coffee drinks.

Throughout the discussion, David emphasizes how the product emerged from a personal journey of health and wellness. After Ethan experienced two broken legs, the family reassessed their approach to nutrition, leading them to discover gaps in children’s vitamin intake. They realized that many kids lacked essential nutrients like calcium and vitamin D, prompting them to formulate a drink that not only tastes good but also provides nutritional benefits. This episode serves not only as a celebration of a small family business but also as a lesson in the importance of listening to children and responding to their needs in a thoughtful way.

The episode further explores the nature of entrepreneurship, particularly in the context of family-run businesses. David shares candid reflections on the learning process, mistakes made along the way, and the significance of customer feedback in refining their product. Their journey illustrates the power of innovation driven by personal experience, as well as the potential for familial collaboration in navigating the challenges of starting a business. Kiid Coffee stands as a testament to how a simple idea can evolve into a meaningful product that resonates with both children and parents, highlighting the broader theme of nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Find 3 flavors of Kiid Coffee at their website, https://kiidcoffee.com or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/KiidCoffee/page/55ADAF21-DA53-411C-BB62-DB9B42E0E2F3

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Kiid Coffee

00:23 Ethan's Inspiration and Love for Coffee

01:27 Creating a Kid-Friendly Coffee

02:11 Taste Testing and Family Involvement

02:55 Balancing Business and Family Life

10:49 Health and Wellness Journey

15:18 Developing Nutritional Products

21:01 Embracing Sweets in Moderation

21:32 The Benefits and Risks of Caffeine

21:50 Marketing to Kids: The Colorful Appeal

22:20 Addressing Concerns About Kids and Coffee

22:49 Health Benefits of Coffee and Caffeine

24:51 Personal Stories: Coffee's Impact on Families

26:44 Exploring Natural and Synthetic Ingredients

31:58 The Journey of Starting Kiid Coffee

33:47 The Importance of Customer Feedback

38:00 Marketing Strategies and Brand Storytelling

41:31 Supporting Small Businesses

42:44 Where to Find Kiid Coffee

Hi, and welcome to another episode of celebrating small family businesses. Today we are excited to celebrate Kid coffee, which is created by David and Ethan Sanborn, father and son.

And you might notice from the picture that Ethan is a little younger than our usual guest. Hi, Ethan. Hi, David.

Hi.

So, Ethan, I understand that the kid coffee business is your idea.

Yeah.

What made you. What made you want to. Want to create a business called kid coffee and make coffee for kids?

Well, I kind of wanted to make some money, and I kind of wanted to have a business. Cause it was kind of cool.

Nice. And why coffee?

Well, you like coffee.

Yeah. But when I like coffee and I like coffee, it just tastes really good.

I don't think he sees a difference of coffee for adults or coffee for himself, but. So the fact that there wasn't a coffee for him was the interesting. Yeah, he doesn't see it as a reason it shouldn't be there.

Okay, well, so, yeah, most. I mean, most adults don't want to give their kids coffee because of the caffeine in the coffee that makes you.

Kind of wakes you up and give you the jitters and. Yeah. Make you crazy. And with kid coffee.

Right. We know, of course, there's a reason that it's coffee for kids.

Yeah. So you set out to make a. What, a healthy version for kids?

Yeah. Yeah.

And what was that like? What did you have to do to figure that out?

Well, I didn't. Like. That's a really hard question.

Like, he's mostly responsible on the. On the taste testing side. So there you go. My background. Yes, my background with quite a bit more food formulation.

And then Ethan's desire and love of the coffee taste kind of came together to really make a product. Ethan being the audience. Right. So he is the. He was the, you could say, the number one taste tester. How many.

How many times do you think you tasted a version of kid coffee?

Like 200 times.

Wow. Okay, so you were the primary representative for kids everywhere who like coffee.

Yeah, you could say, hired dad to make him a good beverage. And then over time, we found the right version that was right tasty to Ethan.

But not only to Ethan, to the kids around the neighborhood that also then found out about kid coffee.

Okay, so you brought some other. Other people in to do taste testing as well? Of course. Wonderful. Ethan, what's it like working with your. With your parents, especially with your dad?

Well, it's fun to work with my mom and dad and my brother, kind of. But.

How old's your brother?

Three. Wait.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a turn four.

Okay. So, yeah, he's. He's going to be another taste tester, I guess.

Indeed. He has a little bit of a handful, we'll say, at times.

So I would imagine so. Wonderful. Well. So, Ethan, who's the boss?

Me.

All right. All right.

That's your picture on the website. Yeah.

I'm the boss, too.

I'm sorry, David, what were you saying?

Oh, I said I'm gained. I'm gainfully employed by my eight year old son.

That's a pretty unusual statement right there.

So, David, how's your boss?

Yeah, I think it's a happy place to be to know that we're working for our kids for their future. Right. Anyway, so no qualms about that and.

Yeah. And learning such valuable business skills and just setting up such a bright future. It's really exciting to hear your story.

I actually haven't been able to taste any kid coffee yet, but I am looking forward to it because I love the idea of the, you know, the cocoa, the. Is it cocoa or cacao? How do you.

Oh, that's a. That's a heavily debated word, I would say. So cacao being the unprocessed, un roasted version of coke. Coca, which is. Usually comes as alkalized coca.

So like a chemically treated coke. Coca is what you get in most. Chocolate. Any chocolate products? For the most part, no.

We do use a sort of unrefined version, which many people call cacao. I honestly, they're the same thing. There's. It's the stage of processing, basically, is the difference. So.

Okay. But so, you know, in the coffee, adult coffee world, they've got mocha, like, mocha drinks, mocha lattes and mocha this.

So it sounds like it might be similar to that. But I'm looking forward to tasting.

Yeah. So I think Ethan has to run off. So we're gonna keep. Thank you for taking the time.

Yes, Ethan, thank you so much for joining us. And we look forward to telling more people about your product so that more kids can enjoy it.

We're gonna buy some for our grandson, so.

Absolutely.

As soon as we can find it. Cool.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

Yeah, he's got his. After school, he has his activities to complete, including a little bit of reading and writing practice.

So school's already started?

School started on Monday.

Oh, wow. Our guys, I think, start on Thursday. Wednesday or Thursday. They were debating that between their two.

I think the west coast doesn't go back for another week.

Yeah, they always, usually are. After Labor Day in a lot of places.

Yeah, it's very interesting as well. Ethan, of course, learning how to read, truly learning how to read at the same time of obviously doing many things with business.

And it's just interesting observation, I guess, for me, is that the amount of things that kids can learn and do it very quickly if you expose them to it, right? If they, you know, you kind of say, oh, business. All that stuff that you.

That you need later in life, you could potentially graduate from college and never have taken a single course on, you know, business, accounting, product development, marketing, all these different things that basically are people's jobs right after they get out of, you know, all of that education. So, you know, Ethan, really tackling these subjects very early, that is.

That is wonderful and good for you.

For listening to him and figuring out his needs, because not a lot of parents can do that. So kudos to you and your wife.

Oh, well, thank you. When I look at parenting and kind of generation, like, how it's done differently, right, one generation to the next to the next.

And truly generations are defined by these interesting, right, baby boomers, by being like post war, right.

These kind of things that you grew up with, including, funny enough, cell phones and sort of the Internet age being a defining point, but also major things like health and wellness and kind of like thinking more about these things and then interest and then the final entrepreneurship, right? What? 30 years ago, not everybody thought they could. They could, you know, sit at home all day and be their own boss, right? And now you can.

So as a parent, you look at it, you say, wow, I have to teach my kids that it's not just go to school every day and then get a job. It possibly looks very different than that, especially for Ethan, 15 years from. Or whatever it might be 15 years from now.

So we have to adapt to those changes. And, yeah, we're doing our best, though we use a lot of Google research to ask parenting questions.

I wish we'd had that.

You know, we were kind of.

We stumbled through a lot.

It was late. He came along late. Yeah. I think the Internet became kind of popularized in the late eighties. Like, 86 is what the number I've got stuck in my head.

So when you say 30 years ago, I mean, that's really tight. And it just literally didn't exist before then.

Now they've kind of shifted those brackets, I guess. But, you know, those small differences. Right. Also, well, actually a huge difference. Right.

Having access to the Internet in my house as a kid, I think, is a big part of, like, what defines that group. So.

Yes, I remember we got our first Mac. You know, it was one of those little ones, and we're all four of us standing around there trying to play a game.

Yeah, look, I was actually pretty lucky. My parents had some, like, PC, like an IBM something from a work that was thousands and thousands of dollars.

And my dad liked to play with it, you know, floppy disks and all these things, trying to get games to work. So I had math blaster, which was. I remember being on a green screen and I, wow. Doing math problems.

And then the Internet being, you know, connecting to the modem and having that in my house in the early nineties, so that it was pretty early for the average, but was based on my parents, basically. Sorry.

No, no, you're cutting edge. We've got a friend of our son's, same thing.

His dad always wanted to have the latest stuff, and, you know, and so he always had his dad's hand me downs, which was like every two years he had a new computer and. And he. I mean, he was. He's been doing technical support for people and building computers for him since junior high school, so.

And he worked for us for years. Early forties, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, he was like a great asset to have.

Right.

Yeah.

Because he knew stuff we didn't know.

You also mentioned, and I want to go back to the health and wellness, because you mentioned health and wellness. And I think your interest in health and wellness and something to do with Ethan played a big part in the development of kid coffee, didn't it?

That's right. I mean, kid coffee is truly.

It started as a lot of things coming together at once, which Ethan, being interested in entrepreneurship, really, like, at the age of six, he kind of started asking. He saw kids have an eliminate stand, and he said, hey, can we do a lemonade stand?

I said, well, let's, like, talk about the kind of economics of an eliminate stand, and like, you're sick, so I can't let you sit there outside, you know, on the curb at age six. So we started to talk through that and then about products, right.

Developing products and then things like marketing and like, how do we tell people about your lemonade stand? And it's funny when you tell that to a six year old, they can come up with a lot of ideas. And I thought that was one of the most, like, kind of.

He said, why don't we just put it right in front of school in the morning where all the cars are driving by? So, because I told him, you know, in our neighborhood, not enough cars drive by, potentially.

So these things that, you know, it was very interesting, his interest. But then along the way, you know, us being parents and being more health focused, I guess I'd say, in the first place.

So we try to buy the best foods and, you know, more organic things, these different things, and then come to find out he breaks his first leg, a spiral fracture, like, jumped in the air and spun around, and it, you know, broke. Like, it's as simple as that for little kids, apparently. And then a year later, 13 months later, doing the exact same thing, but to the other leg.

And that part of the sort of journey for kid coffee was maybe the most important because it was a stopping point where we said, wait, I thought we bought all these good foods. We have multivitamins.

And then the last point to this was in the doctor's appointment, right after that orthopedist said, hey, look, you know, my wife being very concerned, like, there's got to be something wrong. Two broken legs, and he's like, ah, they're boys. You know, that happens. But you should definitely look and see. Check his vitamin D.

And he probably needs more of it, because most kids do. And that statement was, I kind of stopped, and I thought, wait, we do a multivitamin?

And he still kind of disregarded that because the dosage was a lot higher than what you would have see in a kid's multivitamin. And so let's just say one thing led to another. I'm person that doesn't take, like, just offhand advice, even if it's from a doctor.

I'm going to do the research, right? I'm going to start looking into these things. And I have an engineering degree. Like, I'm a very analytical person.

And so one thing led to another, and it was like, whoa, ethan's not getting not only enough vitamin D, he's not getting enough calcium in all the foods that we get.

Getting into the research and realizing calcium, vitamin d, iron is actually a critical one, that worldwide, iron is the number one nutrient deficiency for kids. Do you find iron in most kids? Multivitamins? Zero. Right. It's not in there anymore.

So there's a lot that kind of went into that, and we sort of stepped back and said, I need to me personally, as a having experience in food, saying, I can fix this, this is not very difficult. Creating our own, literally our own vitamin formulation. But then Ethan's still liking the taste of coffee.

And blending those two things together, it became Ethan's like special coffee. Yes. With water, processed decaf, which means there's no chemicals used to decaffeinate it. And you can remove 99.9% of the caffeine.

So you actually are removing caffeine. So, like, chocolate milk can have more caffeine than kid coffee. And that's because coca itself has caffeine.

But these are kind of really funny things that like the coffee flavor. It's not, I would say in the US, people might assume that kids don't like that flavor.

But when you mix it into milk and you make a kid coffee latte, as we call it, it creates effectively, you know, a flavor like a chocolate milk. Right. Or we have a caramel and we have our choco latte. So it is tastes more like a traditional chocolate milk.

But yeah, I mean, it's truly an evolution. A lot of things that came together to develop what ended up being the final product and company.

That's fascinating. Wow. Are you thinking about adding additional, somehow related products, other nutritional products?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the big vision for kid coffee, really, after going through this whole process and my background in creating brands and products in the past, kind of like marrying the two things of passion and what you're good at, what you have experience in. And it's interesting for me to have really sort of aligned now. I really love food. Number one, I just like food.

But when you look at kids nutrition, then seeing so many issues in the market, like most products over the last, you know, decades now, right, it's sugar and more sugar to get kids to like it and it just makes it easier. Right. And we know now, in terms of like public health crisis, sugar being the most direct, simple. It's just a very simple problem, like problem.

And also a simple problem to solve is interesting. It's just that sugar is cheap itself, but that sort of desire for sweetness. So, for instance, with kid coffee, we use organic monk fruit extract.

We don't use a ton of it. So it's still like kid coffee is not overly sweet. It's not a frappuccino from your favorite coffee shop.

But the reality is, especially for kids is, of course they desire sweet as we all do. I mean, it kind of triggers right in your brain. That's a scientific study in of itself. But you take foods anything.

It might be sort of a dessert, right. You start to pare back some of the sugar. You can use some of the sort of sugar substitutes, but not the artificial ones. Right.

Organic monk fruit extracts, stevia is another one that is plant based, but also not too much of it. And for kids, it's not that they need zero sugar. They do need sugar still. Like, they use that for energy.

And so it's not a zero sugar necessary necessarily. But I think overall, if you walk up and down, say, for instance, a grocery store, you know, the aisles are loaded with problematic products.

Let's just put it that way. Especially when you start to look at the age range of three to twelve is really our focus.

And so, yeah, in terms of expansion, we don't really have any specific right now, but we had some ideas for smoothie.

Of course, there's ways to add protein in, we think this idea, Ethan, his experience every day of jumping up, getting breakfast, getting out to school, two working parents, where time is, there's just less time. And so we acknowledge the fact that you might not be making pancakes every morning as a parent, you just don't have the time necessarily.

So how do we kind of create innovative solutions and also bring the nutrition back honestly to those foods, right. And so there's a million ways that we could do it. We'll probably focus on, you know, kid coffee being a beverage at first.

And kind of, of course, we can add flavors, we can add functionality to beverage, and then, you know, there's plenty of snack, lots of different things, and there's other companies out there that are doing it. But, yeah, I mean, we kind of see it as a platform, right.

To be able to address more in terms of nutrition, making it fun still, right, as a port of our brand is to be interesting and fun, and that makes it then more compelling for people to actually want to eat at kids as well. Right.

As opposed to just like kind of a boring brand that says they're doing some super healthy thing that's not fun, in which case then kids, you know, they might not want to actually try it because it's not, you know, cool. Right. Or whatever that is. So, yeah, yeah.

They are totally focused on fun, as they should be. As you were talking there, I was remembering, you know, when in my life, the powdered breakfast drink first came out.

I don't know if I want to mention the brand or not, but, you know, I can remember I was fairly young and there was a, you know, a powdered package Torah tore open and you put it in water or milk, and it was mostly whey powder and a bunch of sugar and, you know.

No, well, I mean, we'll say it directly. I mean, it's.

If you walk into a store, you know, in terms of, from an entrepreneurship angle, you don't, you don't ever want to, like, invent something, usually, because if you invent something, you have to teach people what it is. They don't understand it, those kind of things.

The reality is, nutritional beverages have been around for many decades, right, going back to the fifties, Ovaltine being one of them. Ovaltine still exists in stores, but the problem is those brands haven't evolved with the world, right?

So they have a bunch of sugar, some vitamins, and then a bunch of processed ingredients. And the reality is a millennial, like a younger parent now, is not.

They're picking up the box and reading processed alkali with, you know, cocoa with alkali and, you know, 30 ingredients they can't identify, and they put it back down and they go buy a gallon of milk and throw some, like, raw cocoa powder in there, potentially. Right. There's. That's the sort of mentality. It's not that extreme always, right.

But the truth is, the product itself and the product idea is not, it's not revolutionary. It's really taking a twist and making it, you know, applicable to or making it interesting to consumers now. Right. That's just the reality.

So, yeah, there's carnation instant breakfast. There's a lot of different.

That's the one I was thinking of. Yeah, I drank a bunch of that as a kid.

I had pop tarts. Thanks.

Hey, and that's the thing is, you know, as a brand, we also, like, we're nothing. You know, we don't want to even pretend that we don't enjoy sweets. We enjoy those fun things. Right. But the, the truth is, it's in moderation.

Everything as we try to teach our kids, right? Everything in moderation. Including if you were to drink caffeinated coffee. Of course, kid coffee is 99.9% caffeine free.

But we hope that's an educational moment, right? That you can't go drink energy drinks and ten coffees a day because you will have issues from that.

That being said, coffee itself, there's still so much research now to show that overall, the benefits significantly outweigh the. Any downsides, even if you do drink a lot of caffeine. But, you know, we think they're like that lesson alone of sort of moderation.

Caffeine reduction is something that people talk about today.

Because, yeah, of course, our society, you walk into a grocery store and you see, you know, 100 energy drinks just, they're nice, bright blue and purple and all these pretty colors. Right? Who do you think they're targeting with those colors? It's certainly not just, you know, everybody that's, like, over the age of 18, so.

And there again, the candy aisle has got all sorts of pretty stuff.

Yeah. When you see that, when you see the drink section matches the candy aisle, you know that there's something going on there.

And these are big questions that, you know, again, like from us, we have a lot of audience that reached out via social media say, this is bad. You can't give kids coffee. And the first question we'll ask is, do you mean coffee or caffeine? And some, you know, we'll say, oh, right.

They kind of stop and it's like, let's talk about this. Right. Let's. And, you know, and then it kind of gets to that, well, that's a habit that you're going to develop as an adult.

We're like, well, the research shows the habit itself of drinking coffee is definitely not bad for you because across many countries cultures, coffee is shown to improve many aspects of, like, well, actually longevity. So increasing the amount, the length of your life, but also reducing things like type two diabetes, heart disease, different cancers.

Like, it's, there's a tremendous amount of research, but then there's still the question of caffeine. Right. So that is a substance that. But that's something we have to teach. Right?

I mean, and again, like, same thing back to if you want to enjoy a dessert that's perfectly fine, you just can't have dessert every night of the week or twice a day. Right.

Exactly. In moderation.

And, well, one of the things that, you know, I discovered years ago, green tea has caffeine in it, but it also has an ingredient called l theanine in it. And the Japanese learned to, I think, extract that and then later synthesize it.

And so, and now l theanine and caffeine can be what they call a nootropic or nootropic, however they say it.

But, you know, to, but what the l theanine seems to do, if I understand it correctly, is it softens that, that curve, that caffeine curve of the, you know, the big jump and then the crash and extends it out and smooths it out. And so, you know, it's, again, it's something you can manage if you manage it intelligently, but again, within moderation yeah.

I will have to say we're certainly looking at, because you can use water process to decaffeinate coffee as well. And l theanine, there's quite a bit of research on that now. It's not necessarily a new, there's a lot of new things that come out.

You're like, well, what is the real research behind a lot of mushroom drinks now? There's actually very little really substantiated claims made that could be made.

And yet you see people saying that it's going to make you lose weight and cure everything under the sun. But when you look at things like l Theanine and caffeine, they're actually pretty well studied.

I mean, caffeine certainly like tens of thousands of studies now across different things for different reasons. Right?

But even we even have some parents reach out and they're like, well, caffeine, it's used as a treatment for premature babies, for brain stimulation, right?

And then, and then their kids, you know, I don't know if it just becomes a, like a part of their not necessarily fully caffeinated coffee for the kids once they get to a certain age. But we actually had a mom, right? It's just this, I mean, almost started crying.

Like her son was born at 26 weeks, which, I mean, like, how's that even possible, right? That's, that's unbelievable that you can, he's normal kid now, right? But 26 weeks, right? Like you're thinking, yeah.

Anyway, as a parent, you know, that makes you stop and think, wow, I'm lucky. But, yeah. And then, you know, so now coffee, which has been decaf for her son, but it's their special morning routine, right?

So she sees coffee is like something that's literally saved her son's life, or caffeine in the case specifically. But so she, you know, she takes that very different approach of other parents that think, oh, this is, you know, an addictive stuff.

Substance or whatever. Something like, you know what I mean?

In terms of, like, if you were to just say the word caffeine, some people would say, you know, substance for stimulation, like energy. Right? And other people, in this case his mom would say something that saved my kid's life.

Yeah. The context is very different.

Exactly. Different context. So, yeah, yeah.

A friend of ours is a needle natal in intensive care, nurse practitioner. And she talks about that.

She said they give it to almost all their babies just to stimulate their heart, you know, kind of stimulate everything, that growth pattern. And, you know, I did the same thing. I went and looked at her going what? And she's going, oh, no, she said it.

She said it's kind of one of those miracle things that she said we just take for granted. But she said, when you've got a baby that's this big.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a different world.

Yeah.

And I think that, you know, it's funny to even say that, because when we start to talk health and wellness and we have kid coffee has vitamins in it, and there's a lot of discussion about synthetic vitamins and all these different things, natural vitamins. But coming back to the caffeine is that in most, you know, situations, drugs are made. Right, like synthetic, whatever. Specifically ADHD treatment.

Right. So Adderall, you know, other stimulants, which are amphetamines, I guess, in terms of, like, the core.

And so now you have parents that are talking about, well, they. If they have adhd, then they potentially drink coffee as a sort of. It's not the same. It doesn't treat it the same way.

And there's no research to say it does, but they see it as a kind of a non pharmaceutical alternative, which I think is interesting, the fact that babies, instead of creating some sort of very expensive, you know, synthetic version, they are literally using nature's, like, own version of it, which is pretty rare because most pharma companies would want to make a patented drug. And yet, in this case, it's actually taken straight from. It probably is taken straight from coffee or anything else that never use that caffeine.

So that's pretty amazing to me, actually.

How did you get to your background? You mentioned product development and engineering.

Did you always have an interest in health and wellness, or was that an education that came after because of Ethan?

Always some interest in health and wellness, I should say. I've always been, you know, I like to work out, you know, my wife as well.

We just enjoy sort of the athletic, you know, fitness side, I think kind of with that came food and kind of thinking more about food. But generally, we're actually pretty. We like to work out, but that doesn't mean that we go crazy on these, like, food.

You know, we're not some crazy dieters or do keto, all these different diets or anything like that. We just kind of have a general, like, regular diet, try to eat more vegetables and those things.

So I wouldn't say that I ever, like, you know, specifically, I've always kind of been and thinking about, like, health and wellness and those things. But, yeah, when you have kids, of course, as you guys know it, there's a thing that changes, right?

You think, oh, maybe we shouldn't have, you know, pizza this extra night, right? Like it. And it's. Again, it comes back to that as a.

As a family or as a parent, then you acknowledge it like, it's not just your life anymore, it's somebody else's. And that you certainly hope, if anything, right?

I would say, as a parent, you want theirs to be your kids, to be better life than yours, and there's all kinds of things that come with that. But I played football for a long time.

I have a messed up knee now that, like, I'm not even 40, and I have, like, what's effectively considered arthritis.

And so there's things like that that now you think about, okay, maybe, you know, playing football through high school and into college isn't the best thing if you want your kids to be able to walk when they're. I, you know, older. And, of course, all the things that we've learned about, again, we've talked about it. Foods, sports, athletics. Right.

These different things that I would have definitely made different decisions, I guess I'd say, if I would have known to. But, you know, at the end of the day, it is what it is. So with our children, right. We can do better.

Yeah, she'd been my pediatrician, too, and so, you know, but. But as a parent, it was like, if my kid wanted to wrestle, it was gonna be a fight about this, you know, the weight thing.

And as it turned out, it got. He got so lucky because he did want to wrestle. But the school, there was. Something had happened with the school, and they got kicked out of a.

They couldn't compete in the league, so nobody had to worry about making weight, so he could just wrestle and enjoy it without all the negatives, and he had a great time. So, you know, sometimes things work out like that. But I totally get the concern as a parent, and, man, I love what you guys are doing.

I don't know what question to ask next.

Well, let's go back to the standard of what would you do differently? Or, you know, what would you have done a little bit differently, I guess. If you knew what you know now or knew then, would you know that?

Yeah, of course. I mean, I would definitely say. You mean going back to, say, before Ethan broke his legs or how far back.

How far back were you starting but starting your company, but starting kids coffee.

Kid coffee?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean. I mean, kid coffee is, in relative terms, very new. So Ethan is eight. He just turned eight a month ago. Not even a month ago. So we really started.

We already had sort of the product in the sense that Ethan was drinking this drink, and then he told some friends about it, and it was like the reaction, as you can imagine, was what, from a parent point of view, was like, what are you talking about?

You know, coffee for kids, which in today's world, those, in my mind, having built some brands and now sort of, it changes right over time, is the way this works. Advertising is very expensive, so you need people to have a reason to talk about your product. There's no reason.

Then you better be a celebrity or you better be an influencer. You better have a podcast with millions of viewers and then, or listeners, and then you can launch a product because you have an audience.

But if you don't, then I do think it's important to build these things into the brand or to build them into a brand. And it just so happened again, those kind of came together. But if we. I would say early on, we've definitely made some mistakes. Right.

Only technically started shipping product about four or five months ago. Four months ago. So in late March. And we already learned, I mean, things like vitamin types and those things. I mean, we continue to get better.

So you create a product because it's something that people. It feels, it meets, like a problem that people have. There's many ways to solve problems, right?

So products are kind of like one solution, there's another solution, there's another solution, right? So what we. And I truly believe, like, customer feedback is everything, right? Your company will exist for your customers.

So, you know, once you launch a product, then you actually find out a lot more because you can't really learn anything from somebody until they pay. Until they pay you for their. For the product. You can't learn anything because, you know, if you go ask your neighbors, is this a good idea?

They're like, I don't want to offend them. So, yeah, it's a good idea. And then you say, will you pay me for it? And they might be like, oh, I don't know if I'll pay you for that product.

What is this product service? So in launching, we've learned a lot already.

Things like I mentioned, vitamin types and certain vitamins, whether they're considered natural or synthetically made, there's lots of questions that moms have now about, for instance, flavoring, natural flavors, vanilla extracts, these different things you use in food, which, interestingly, there's not a lot of completely true information to share. Like, on the Internet, there's a lot of halfway true information, but it's very false in a lot of ways. And unfortunately, you can't fight all that.

So there's things that you need to improve in the product. We use organic, natural flavors of vanilla and caramel. If you look specifically at that, there's eat.

The European Union has much more strict control controls on what that means.

In the United States, organic natural flavors has a pretty strict control, but natural flavors means that there's a lot of different chemicals being added in there to make a flavor.

So that's one example of, you know, we've already started to take the product and say, okay, we're going to use European Union certified, which limits the amount of ingredients, because the European Union has a much more strict view on what you should eat. Right. In terms of chemicals and processing aids and all these different things.

So simple things like that, that we constantly take feedback, and I would say we're trying to improve and learn because you're never going to know all these things upfront until again, who is the person that buys? And then what do they tell you about the products, including, for us, simple things as well?

Some parents just want coffee, decaffeinated coffee with, like, no extra sort of benefits, right. They're just looking for that taste and bring the cost down. So those things like that that we never really thought about.

We just kind of, you know, you started with whatever you think you want or the customer wants, and then, you know, as you go along, you have to take that feedback and incorporate it into your company and your product, everything.

Wow. So there's a possibility of maybe an adulthood spinoff there for, you know, just the decaf coffee. Wow, kids.

I mean, how weird is it that decaf has. Decaf has been around for, you know, forever, but it's like less than 10% market share in the US, in the rest of the world, that drinks more coffee.

It's a higher percentage market share. But the US has kind of just become caffeine, like focused.

But the reality is as people either get older, they can't, they can't drink caffeine past say noon because it'll affect your sleep.

So we kind of see, yeah, interestingly, there is, I think, a big opportunity in the market alone of, again, awareness on caffeine, awareness on water process decaffeination.

Because the other version, methylene chloride, is a industrial processing chemical that there's a lot of research now coming out or people talking about the fact that traditional decaf is not necessarily the best idea. For instance, just water process decaffeination removes even more caffeine, and again, with no chemicals. So, you know, what if that became 3%?

What if it increased by one percentage point of the share? Well, if you look at the US, there's, is it 450 million cups of coffee a day are consumed in the US 1% chunk of it.

Imagine if you just incrementally moved it 1%.

That's a lot of water processed, decavated coffee that going to be sold, which represents to me, of course you look at it, that could be a large market opportunity. And we do have moms that actually are moms and dads. And multiple people have commented like, I'm not buying this for kids, this is for me.

Oh, this is awesome. This is like a masterclass in marketing and product development and branding.

And some of the questions that you've brought up about making it fun and you kind of touched on story, but there's a story here too. And I remember we watched a lot of episodes of the prophet. And one of the things he pushed Marcus Lemonis, I think his name.

The story matters to people. People relate to a story and they want to buy because of that story.

And you were talking about that as far as creating that brand loyalty and the place in the crowded marketplace, excited for people to see this.

Listen, I think if you actually look right now, there's some really successful companies, and the trick is they put it all on the line, all on the Internet, which of course, a lot of families would be like, let's not do that. But you see reality tv kind of do this is like, put the, put the family on the Internet, they can do it.

I mean, look at the Kardashians have like $20 billion business behind. But it's only because again, they became celebrities from effectively putting their family on the Internet.

But to take that back to like a more simple level, you know, people do want to buy from people. I think that's more true today than it was in the past, where the big companies could be kind of like the people behind the curtain.

And now, of course, with social media and these, you know, a lot of different changes in the way that people consume media and where they learn about products. I do think telling a story is more important than ever. So then your question is, what's interesting as a story?

You could have an auto repair shop, but to do funny videos where it's like, this is what we learned today. This is how you run a garage, this is how you run an automotive repair shop. And adding a little bit of drama in there, potentially.

I'm not saying we're going to do any drama type stuff, but if you look right now, brands are as much small brands that are growing quickly are as much about producing media that's interesting as they are, like, selling a product. And if they focus, actually what they're finding is they're focusing on the media side.

The product sells itself because people feel they can relate to who they are, why they would want to buy this product, all these different things, and they don't feel like it's an ad, right. They feel like, I'm buying from this person. It just so happens that I also need whatever this product is, right? It could be anything.

Of course, you need to get your car fixed. So who do you pick? Do you pick the guy that you don't know or the guy that you see on social media that you think is funny?

So there's just, you know, those kind of things that I feel like every company doesn't matter if you're a cookie shop, a bakery, or a. Last thing is reviews. People now shop based on opinions that are shared, not on, like, Amazon reviews. Everybody knows that, right?

Like, what star rating is this product? But, you know, Google search, but TikTok, Instagram, Facebook have now become places that people check. Like, what is the.

What are the results of this company? Like, if it's a home, you know, home renovation company, they're gonna look there.

Like, they might look at Google reviews and Yelp, but they also might look at your social media or these other pages. So it is an interesting world that we're in, and something that I think every company doesn't matter. What you do needs to keep in mind.

And putting a face to a business in today's world is very invaluable, I'd say. You just have to decide. It doesn't have to be your face, it could be somebody else's. Face, but there needs to be a face associated with it.

And small businesses are the backbone of America. You know, we, if you look at the amount of small family businesses that are in America alone, it's overwhelming.

And we don't give a lot of kudos to those families, and that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah. Despite the hard work. I mean, we have coffee shops, independent. Right? So not Starbucks, not dunkin'but.

Man, the owners, we can barely talk to them, usually because they're so busy. Like, they're right, you know, buying all the inventory and trying to manage social media, do all these different things. And.

Yeah, I mean, it's a, you know, from our point, you were just like, how can we help then? Because I know you're busy. Of course we want to sell our product, but, like, at the end of the day, you and I are similar.

Like, in the sense that you run into business. I'm running a business, and we only have so much time in a day, so.

Exactly.

And let's support each other and help each other get through this. Yeah.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, David, for spending this time with us and telling us your story and for bringing Ethan on.

Yeah, we appreciate that.

Like I said, I'm excited to taste kid coffee for myself and to share this episode.

Can you tell us where to get it now?

Yeah, as of right now, we're only on our website. We will launch on Amazon soon. And the main reason is that it's cheaper to ship products that way.

It's just expensive to ship products from your own warehouse. Amazon has a lower cost structure, but we'll have it in both places. Our website, kid Kiid, so kidcoffee.com altogether.

And, yeah, that's the easiest place to find more information.

And we'll have all this information on our show notes later.

Exactly.

So.

All right. Thank you again.

So fun. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your kid with us.

And we invite our audience to try kid coffee.

Yes.