Fast-growing Bizzy Coffee has signed a lease and plans to move its operations from a northeast Minneapolis food incubator to Brooklyn Center by the end of the month.
The three-year-old company — which bottles organic, cold-brew coffee shots — is leasing and building out 7,000 square feet of manufacturing space in an industrial park. Bizzy Coffee, which sells online and in 1,000 food stores nationwide, is growing 50 percent a month and needs the room to keep up with demand, said co-founder Andrew Healy.
"We are slated to move in there and expect to start producing coffee in August," Healy said. "We are very motivated. Sales have been moving so fast that we have a tight deadline."
The company, now Amazon.com's largest cold-brew coffee seller, also markets its bottled coffee concentrate via two large Midwest and West Coast distributors and in Hy-Vee, Fresh Thyme and Natural Grocers stores. In addition to tiny shots of black, vanilla or caramel coffee, Healy and co-founder Alex French recently introduced a 32-ounce bottle of Bizzy Coffee concentrate. That's on shelves at Kowalski's, Lunds & Byerlys and food co-ops such as Mississippi Market, Seward Co-op and Lakewinds Food Co-op.
Separately, the company is working to expand in the "food service" arena, which could include restaurants, stadiums or vending machines, Healy said.
Not bad for two guys who discovered coffee shots while training for the World's Toughest Mudder extreme race. At the time, the two had started some side businesses, but had full-time corporate jobs. They had an idea on how to make coffee shots better — and sell them. After becoming a semifinalist in the 2015 Minnesota Cup, they were accepted into the Food-X accelerator program in New York City. In 2016, it was part of the inaugural class of the local Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator.
The growth has been exciting, they said. But it also means the company was quickly outgrowing its northeast Minneapolis roots, where Bizzy Coffee first launched inside a food incubator building in 2015. It took over space that was previously used by a cheese-making tenant. It adapted some of the equipment and business slowly took off.
The new factory in Brooklyn Center is being laid out to Bizzy Coffee's specifications. It is double the size of the initial incubator site and will be large enough to warehouse coffee beans imported from South and Central America and provide manufacturing space.