Standing Among Coffee Giants, Two Guys From Gary, Indiana Are Selling Beans With a Mission

Behind most every big consumer brand looms the story of how its founders came up with the name. Frequently, the process was an agonizing one. Ford Motor, for example, commissioned enough research to produce 6,000 possible names for its flagship 1958 sedan—only to wind up naming it after Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. (The car flopped.) For a moment, Nike founder Phil Knight was going to call his new sneaker brand Bengal in an attempt to square off with Puma, but wisely demurred. Amazon’s own Jeff Bezos was originally going to name his online store Cadabra (as in abracadabra)—until someone told him that name sounded a lot like cadaver. But ask Jarrhod (“Rod”) Johnson how he and business partner Pernell Cezar came up with Blk & Bold, the name for their upstart coffee brand, and he’ll explain that it was all surprisingly straightforward. “We looked in the mirror,” he said. “We thought about ourselves. We thought about what this journey represents. We thought about the products inside the bag. Black and bold is what truly represents who we are and the products that we serve.” None of which is hyperbole. Not only are Johnson and Cezar African-American entrepreneurs making a decidedly robust roast, they’re selling a product that, until recently, neither knew much about. (To learn about the coffee business, Johnson told Adweek, “we did what everyone else does—we went to YouTube.”) What’s more, unlike any number of other Black-owned brands that address themselves to niche markets (think: cosmetics or fashion), Blk & Bold is competing in the most mass-market category imaginable: coffee—which is, after water, the most consumed beverage in the United States. For a Brand Refresh, Folgers Finds ‘The Best Part of Waking Up’ in New Orleans And so: Black? Check. Bold? Definitely. The double entendre is also no accident. “We are big hip-hop fans,” Johnson said, and since that genre “is predicated on wordplay and euphemisms, we wanted to have an element of that in our business.” But the whimsy ends there. After all, coffee is a $47 billion industry in America, and Johnson and Cezar—neophytes with no formal training in the food business—are picking a fight with the neighborhood toughs. Mixing it up with the big beans According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Folgers and Starbucks hold the No. 1 and 2 positions in the packaged dry coffee segment, having sold roughly 612 million and 480 million gallons of beans, respectively, in 2020. Legacy brands not only dominate the sector in terms of household name recognition, but in marketing power. The combined market cap of the parent companies behind Maxwell House, Starbucks and Folgers, for instance, comes to some $543 billion. Yet despite the odds against it, in barely four years Blk & Bold has deftly maneuvered itself onto the national stage. From an inauspicious start roasting beans in Cezar’s garage, the duo now has a 20,000-square-foot roastery in Des Moines, Iowa, and distributes their beans to 5,600 retail locations—including Target stores, which began stocking the brand last month. Ben & Jerry's partnered with Blk & Bold in September on a flavor it called Change is Brewing. In September, ice cream behemoth Ben & Jerry’s partnered with Blk & Bold on a limited batch called Change Is Brewing, a cold-brew coffee ice cream spiked with fudge brownies and marshmallows. The NBA has come knocking, too. A limited partnership that began last summer with two varieties of a special brew called The Warmup (the blue bag was for the Eastern Conference and the red back for the Western), is now expanding into a line of six, team-themed bags. The rise of Blk & Bold, observed retail analyst Bruce Winder, “is a remarkable story. And it says a lot as to where we are right now in society because coffee is incredibly commoditized. And you've got these giant behemoth mega companies who dominate and have all the resources in the world. But these two guys have cut right through the middle—because they have a purpose.” NBA-themed line The Warm Up now features brews for six teams. This purpose is a percentage At a time when companies from fast-food chains to petrochemical giants all claim to be making the world a better place, it’s easy to be cynical about corporate missions. But Blk & Bold does have a purpose, and it literally comes out of the bottom line. A certified B Corporation, Blk & Bold gives 5% of its profits to some 15 nonprofit groups that address the issues and needs of at-risk youth. Its charity partners include the By Degrees Foundation, which works to increase high-school graduation rates, and the Urban Growers Collective, whose 11 acres of farmland on Chicago’s South Side truck fresh agricultural products into the city's many food deserts. Last year, Blk & Bold gave just north of $60,000 to its charity partners. And while that figure might be little more than rounding error for its blue-chip competitors, Johnson points out that it’s also “three times as much money as it took for us to start the business.” In a sense, however, dollar figure donations are academic when compared to the larger mechanism at work: This is a company that wants to make an impact and a profit, and has made the two co-dependent. And while many companies tout their various social giveback initiatives, the difference here is that Johnson and Cezar founded the brand with these commitments built in. “Our contribution to those organizations is [written] on every bag,” Johnson points out. “So people know that we’re not just doing this for the moment. This is who we are. This is why we started the business.” Straight Outta Gary It’s hard to argue with such commitments when they come from two Black men from Gary, Indiana, which invariably turns up on various media outlets' "most dangerous" and "most miserable" lists. Growing up on the same street and friends since their early teens, Johnson and Cezar were the first kids in their respective families to go to college—Johnson to Indiana University and Cezar to the University of Northern Iowa. The idea to start a coffee brand came when Cezar called Johnson on the phone and said: “Hey man, do you drink coffee? I have an idea.” Johnson didn’t drink coffee, as it turned out, but he listened. After all, he was looking for the sort of career opportunity that didn’t exist in an office cubicle. “We knew that going to work, doing the regular 9-to-5 and climbing a corporate ladder really didn’t appeal to us,” Johnson said. As kids, both the friends had benefitted from the presence of the local Boys and Girls Club, whose programs in everything from athletics to music to art lessons offer youth “a way to beat the streets,” to quote a TV spot from the 1980s. As Johnson and Cezar plotted strategy for their coffee brand, the commitment to funnel a percentage of profits into nonprofits helping at-risk youth was in place before they ever began roasting beans. Buying his brand, Johnson said, gives people a chance to "shop their values." The politics of roasting This component of the brand’s identity is more than just a nice backstory, argues brand consultant Hayes Roth—it’s the sort of differentiator that large competitors simply can’t match, even if they give millions of dollars to charities, because Johnson and Cezar have that golden and elusive characteristic called authenticity. “They’re not just newcomers—they’re newcomers with a real story,” Roth said. “That’s the difference. These guys have a real story. It’s completely authentic—and appealing on top of it. These two guys are ready for primetime.” It’s tempting to ague that being a Black-owned brand is another built-in advantage for the pair, especially in the post-George Floyd era when a larger portion of the general public is aware of race and social justice issues, and blue-chip companies are working—at times, scrambling—to diversify their workforces, vendors and public images. But Johnson is cautious about this notion. On the one hand, customers who want to support Black enterprise now have a clear choice for their morning brew. “One of the many reasons why people rock and shop with us is because we are Black owned and they feel as though they’re shopping their values,” Johnson said. At the same time, Blk & Bold’s unapologetically progressive stance on social issues might be too hot for some coffee drinkers. “The emphasis [we] place on social justice could be a detriment,” he said. “There are a lot of people who are resistant to the idea of supporting businesses that are social impact-focused.” Wherever one comes down on social issues, however, Johnson points out one unassailable truth of the beverage business: “If the coffee is shitty, no one cares who owns it.” The future is brewing Johnson and Cezar have taken pains to make sure that buying Blk & Bold doesn’t come down to doing good through drinking bad coffee. As a specialty coffee brand, Blk & Bold uses beans that have been graded 80 points or higher on a 100-point scale, as prescribed by certified coffee tasters. The company buys arabica beans only, and it’s fair trade to boot. In sum, it’s a very respectable cup of joe. (“Some darn good, affordable coffee that’s available with one click on Amazon,” said one reviewer.) Word of mouth like that is a useful thing, since Blk & Bold’s numbers (profits reportedly ran less than $1 million dollars last year) don’t allow for a Procter & Gamble-sized marketing budget. Johnson hopes the impending launch of a merchandise line—hats, hoodies and masks to start—will turn loyal customers into “walking billboards” and help “spark conversation” about the brand. Even if it doesn’t, Johnson is surprised at how far his fledgling company has come in so short a time. “We didn't set out with the intent to be alongside those household [coffee brand] names—it just happened that way,” he said. “We didn't anticipate that we would look at them as peers so quickly.” How This LGBTQ+, Woman-Owned Coffee Brand Aims to Create a More Inclusive Space