The startup banishing bad office coffee once and for all

Welcome back to the office, San Francisco professional! Here’s your mediocre-at-best cup of coffee dispensed from a hulking batch brewer.

Or, maybe not. Because a Bay Area startup is hoping to transform the humdrum world of workplace joe, one cup at a time. 

The company behind this vision is BrewBird (opens in new tab). Its sleek stallion of a coffee maker brews single cups at the touch of a button. But unlike Keurig or Nespresso machines, which rely on disposable plastic pods filled with pre-ground coffee, BrewBird uses whole beans and precise extraction times. “It’s been a pain point throughout my career: Why couldn’t I get a really great cup of coffee where I was spending my time, at the office or at home?” says CEO Mickey Du. 

Du cofounded BrewBird in 2019 after spending years in both food and tech — at Diageo, one of the world’s largest alcohol companies, and as an investor-turned-product manager at NerdWallet. But he began his passionate pursuit of office coffee after trying Blue Bottle in 2005. “It stuck with me, the incredible experience of a great cup of coffee,” he says. 

Brewbird launched at Meta’s offices in 2023. Since then, it has expanded throughout the Bay Area, dispensing coffee to workers at Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Gap, while signing partnerships with a who’s who of local roasters: Sightglass (opens in new tab), Ritual (opens in new tab), and Andytown (opens in new tab) in San Francisco; Mother Tongue (opens in new tab) in Oakland; Cat & Cloud (opens in new tab) and Verve (opens in new tab) out of Santa Cruz; and Black Oak (opens in new tab) from Healdsburg. 

The marriage of fancy coffee and smart tech was on full display at a recent Brewbird pop-up, held ironically in a former Starbucks in downtown San Francisco. Two machines were churning out cups at a steady clip for curious onlookers. While visually reminiscent of other single-cup coffee makers, BrewBird differs in both hardware and software. Each fully compostable pod has a QR code that tells the machine the ideal water temperature and brew time for the beans inside (though all cups clock in around 60 seconds). 

This is meant to replicate the quality of coffee brewed by a barista, a process that tends to get lost in translation when taken outside of the cafe setting. In a normal office, beans might be stored for months at a time or get brewed in haste, only for the coffee to sit for hours on end. 

“There’s always been hesitation around selling our coffee outside of the four walls of our brick-and-mortar locations, because you start to lose control of the end product,” says Sharon Healy, CEO of Sightglass Coffee, one of BrewBird’s first local coffee partners. 

The BrewBird machine took years of development and “between 12 and 20 iterations” to produce, says Du. The alpha version, on display at the company’s San Carlos headquarters, is a wooden box that looks like a cross between a high school robotics project and a Burning Man art piece. It took about 15 minutes to brew a single cup of coffee. In addition to fine-tuning the apparatus, Du and his team realized they had to set up systems to automate the coffee packaging process, which led to the creation of a microfactory in Belmont where they receive fresh beans that are weighed, packaged, and labeled with the all-important QR codes. 

As R&D progressed, it became clear that BrewBird was going to be an expensive product, better suited for companies looking to entice employees back to the office than for at-home use. A machine costs $10,000, and each pod is around $2. BrewBird has been subsidizing the cost of the machine for some early customers and has lease options available, with the expectation that prices will come down as the company scales. 

Du hopes to ultimately make BrewBird, and high-quality coffee in general, more accessible to everyone — not just workers annoyed about having to come to the office. He compares this version of the BrewBird machine to the pricey, early iterations of iPhones and Teslas. 

At that recent pop-up, I tasted three coffees: one from Andytown, my go-to neighborhood joint; a decaf cup from Mother Tongue; and a cup with surprising fruit-forward flavors from North Carolina-based Black & White Coffee Roasters — potentially an indicator of BrewBird’s expansion plans. All easily matched the quality of a cup from any of San Francisco’s best shops, while simultaneously banishing the spectre of bad office coffees past. Which, at $2 a pop, isn’t a bad deal. 

“A cup of pre-brewed drip coffee at Starbucks is $5 a cup now,” Du says. “We can already come in well below that and offer a much better experience.”

BrewBird is planning a weeklong pop-up at One Market Plaza in December. Follow the company on Instagram (opens in new tab) or TikTok (opens in new tab) for details.