Building A $500 Million Coffee Chain By Selling TikTok Drinks To Teens – CoffeeTalk

Blank Street, a Brooklyn-based coffee chain, has gained popularity by offering sugary, colorful, caffeinated, TikTok-friendly green tea in various flavors. The company, which has a $500 million valuation, has joined other brands like Sephora and Stanley that have gained cultural relevance due to teen customers. The trend has led to high-schoolers ordering matcha at school and seeing people drinking it in class.

Co-founders Vinay Menda and Issam Freiha realized they could hit it big with flavored matcha two years ago after a mixologist on their London team created a blueberry drink that went viral. Since then, Blank Street has been doubling down on new matcha beverages, rolling out a few every season. Matcha now accounts for approximately 50% of the business, Menda said.

Blank Street raised $25 million in a Series B round of funding at the end of May, bringing its total funding amount to $135 million. The company says it is profitable, earning an estimated revenue of $149 million annually. It has plans to eventually expand its 90 global stores to locations such as Miami and Los Angeles.

The company’s marketing team creates fake personas with character-building mood boards around each new matcha drink to help them think about customers it serves. Blank Street has had huge success with some flavors, like banana-bread matcha, but others haven’t done as well, like a grapefruit cold-brew spritz Freiha described as “the most rogue one we’ve ever done.”

In other words, Blank Street is trying to sell a lifestyle. Customers like Alexis Taliento prefer Blank Street to Starbucks, whose menu she finds overwhelming. They prefer Blank Street because it is clean, new, fresh, and super aesthetic.

A Blank Street matcha drink can have 25 grams of sugar, just at the daily suggested limit for women by the American Heart Association. Customers like Maddie Klancher, a 23-year-old Brooklyner, buy matcha from Blank Street four to five times a week out of convenience. The company also offers an invite-only membership, where baristas give customers access to pay $22 a month for up to 14 drinks a week. The program has a long wait list and has fueled online frenzy.

Maddi Klancher, a 23-year-old financial technology professional, said she bought matcha from Blank Street four to five times a week out of convenience. She has had better matcha from other places, but at $7 a drink, Blank Street has lower prices.

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