The daily grind

Many a good idea is born over a cup of coffee with a friend, but this particular good idea was born of two friends’ frustration with essentially ordinary, over priced coffee and the lack of a good, healthy alternative.

Meet Dylan Garft, Byron Bay local, ultramarathon runner and co-founder of SIPP Instant, who, along with business partner and good mate, Luke Zocchi, are changing the way we think about coffee – one cup or at least one SIPP at a time.

Speaking with Dylan it’s obvious from the outset that he’s one of those people whose enthusiasm is infectious. To hear him talking about the origins of the SIPP brand, it seems like the most natural thing in the world, that two friends would get chatting, decide to create not only a new coffee brand but a better, more sustainable one and bang, next thing you know it’s on the market and going gang busters. 

All the hard work aside though, that’s pretty much how SIPP Instant came into being and now the company that kicked off in the idyllic New South Wales town of Byron Bay, is winning hearts all over the world.

In a nutshell, the boys met pursuing their own professional careers – Dylan with his own marketing and design business, and Luke one of the leading lights in the health and fitness industry, perhaps best known for whipping Chris Hemsworth into shape for his role as Thor in the Marvel movies.

The two hit it off with their shared love of a healthy lifestyle and, amongst many others things, a good cup of coffee.

But just how do you go about creating a new coffee brand and taking it to an ever-expanding world market? Obviously having a great product was step number one, but for Dylan and Luke, having a great product is just part of the equation.

“We wanted to make a product that was really healthy and functional for you. That’s where the organic coconut crema came in and the heat resistant probiotics," says Dylan.

“We’ve really created a functional coffee or super coffee. It took us over a year to get the recipe right.”

“It contains heat resistant probiotics that only activate once they hit your gut enzymes, meaning that they’re stable at room temperature or at boiling point, but they won’t activate until they reach your stomach. We also added a complex carbohydrate which is a mixture of six organic grains for modulated energy release.”

“We also wanted to make it convenient and user friendly so you didn’t need any fancy machines – you just needed to have hot water.”

And sustainability and environmental impact was also a serious consideration. Looking at some other coffee brands on the market, the fact that more than three million coffee ‘pods’ and capsules were finding their way into landfill in Australia daily was simply unacceptable to Dylan and Luke, so SIPP’s packaging had to be 100 percent biodegradable.

“We wanted to create a brand and a product that had all these properties in it. It had be sustainable with ingredients from responsible sources. And it had to be compostable and giving back had to come into it,” says Dylan.

So to that end, packaging is completely biodegradable and a dollar from every bag of coffee goes directly to the not-for-profit organisation, Wild Ark, a percentage that constitutes over four percent of total profit – significantly more than the ‘one percent for the planet’ touted by many other companies.

A pretty significant list of generating factors, but Dylan says that from day one, in his gut he knew that this [SIPP Instant] was going to be a success.

“I don’t know if that’s what every entrepreneur thinks when they start their own business. Perhaps it is and that’s just normal, but in my head I knew that this was going to succeed.”

Of course passionate or not, Garft is a realist and acknowledges that vision is worth precious little without the hard work to back it up. To that end, his marketing business is no more as he concentrates ‘200 percent’ on the SIPP Instant business.

But the results are there, with the company in its second year of operation recording a 94 percent growth from year one and let’s not forget that that’s been smack in the middle of a global pandemic. Along the way the pair have also picked up the Audi Innovation Award at last year’s GQ Men of the Year Awards and are forging ahead against much bigger and certainly more established players from all over the globe.

Awards like the Audi Innovation award are really important says Dylan and ‘signify they’re heading in the right direction’.

Thus far they’ve gone through two rounds of investment, with the second round seeing Chris and Liam Hemsworth both become significant investors in SIPP. This will also mean that the Hemsworths will become more prominent in the promotion of the brand in the future.

But while the celebrity association is nice, the brand lives and dies on the product and the ideology behind it – and Dylan is very excited about new product in the pipeline.

“We’ve got a new top secret coffee coming soon which is a world first tropic coffee which has been proven to increase brain functionality.” 

Called ‘infusion coffee’ this new blend doesn’t use the coconut crema but is a black coffee that contains an ingredient called ‘neuro factor’ in the probiotics – and of course organically-certified coffee beans as well.”

This combination of taste and the company’s genuine green credentials are making tremendous inroads with an ever increasing clientele.

“We’re creating a brand that people are also passionate about and they can see what we do and what we say and that it’s not bullshit.”

And while Dylan concedes that he can’t speak to every customer individually, the approach is still a personal one, with the pair putting themselves in their marketing rather than resorting to using models and a fabricated marketing message. The thrust is very much ‘this is what we drink every morning’ as opposed to ‘this is our product’.

“We do go and surf together, we go on hikes… these aren’t set-ups to get the shot.”

That level of authenticity certainly strikes a chord in a world where these days so much is contrived. It also helps to only use certified materials where so many other companies make claims that use all of the right buzz words like ‘sustainable’ and ‘recyclable’ but don’t stand up to closer scrutiny – a practice called ‘greenwashing’.

The SIPP approach is certainly working and even with a global pandemic and all of the restrictions  that go with it, the future is looking bright.

“At the moment we are an Australia-based company that exports to more than 50 countries around the world, but we want to make it [SIPP products] more accessible to other countries,” says Dylan. 

“We want to set up US distribution, European distribution and even South Korean and we’re looking at distribution in India.”

“So we’re looking at global expansion … world domination as we call it amongst our little group of investors.”